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TABLE-TALK. 



TABLE-TA 



TO WHICH ARE ADDED 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS OF POPE AND SWIFT. 



Q BY LEIGH HUNT. 



LONDON : 
SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 15, WATEBLOO PLACE. 

1870. 



PREFACE. 



The title of this volume, " Table-Talk," will, it is 
hoped, be found by the reader to be warranted by the 
conversational turn of the style, as well as the nature 
and variety of the subjects touched upon, and the 
manner in which they are treated. Some portion 
was really talked ; and it may be said of the rest, 
that the thoughts have, in all probability, passed the 
writer's lips in conversation. 

The " Imaginary Conversations of Pope and 
Swift" were considered an appropriate addition to 
a volume of " Table-Talk," and are intended strictly 
to represent both the turn of style and of thinking 
of these two poets ; though the thoughts actually 
expressed are the writer's invention. 

a — 3 



Tl PREFACE. 

On correcting the sheets for press, I am not 
aware of any remark that I should particularly wish 
to modify, with the exception of something that is 
said of Germany in the course of the article on 
" Goethe." I have since become better acquainted 
with the great intellects of that nation ; which has 
unquestionably produced the leading thinkers of the 
century. The world has yet to learn the extent of 
its obligations to such men as Goethe and Schiller, 
to Lessing, to Kant, to Herder, Richter, Fichte, and 
others. 

LEIGH HUNT. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

TABLE-TALK 1 

LADIES CARVING AT DINNER 3 

ANOMALIES OF DISHES AND FURNITURE, &C 4 

TOPICS FOR DINNER 6 

WILD-FLOWERS, FURZE, AND WIMBLEDON 8 

MISTAKES OF THE PRESS 12 

MAT-TIME „ 14 w^ 

MALICE OF FORTUNE 17 

BISHOPS AND BRAHMINS 17 

THE " BLESSED RESTORATION " 23 

THE SUN „ 25 

BON-MOT OF A COACHMAN 25 

SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE 27 

OVID ; 28 

THE VOICE OF THE ROOK 29 

HOW LAWYERS GO TO HEAVEN 30 

^COLLINS, THE POET 30 

A FACT 34 

the two conquerors 35 

clerical titles 35 

-a horace walpole and pinkerton 36 

jews 39 

j smollett 40 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

CHEMISTRY 42 

PETTY CONVENIENCES AND COMFORTS 44 

TEARS „ 46 

DR. ALDRICH 47 

LORD MARCHMONT'S RECEIPT FOR LONGEVITY 48 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 50 

DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA 50 

WONDER NEVER CEASES 52 

DALY, THE DUBLIN MANAGER 53 

LIGHT AND COLOURS 55 

VERSIONS OF ANCIENT LYRICS 57 

CATHERINE THE SECOND OF RUSSIA 59 

PETRARCH AND LAURA 60 

MOEAL AND PERSONAL COURAGE 63 

TIGHT-LACING 63 

GRAVITY AND INDUSTRY OF DANCERS 66 

ADVERTISEMENTS 68 

SPORTSMEN AND CUSTOM 69 

BEARS AND THEIR HUNTERS 69 

SELF-STULTIFICATION 71 

COWSLIPS 73 

APRIL FOOLS 74 

PRIVATE WAR 76 

BEAUMARCHAIS '. 80 

MOZART 81 

VIOLET — WITH A DIFFERENCE 81 

VERBAL MISTAKES OF FOREIGNERS 82 

HUME AND THE THREE LITTLE KINGS 83 

A CHARMING CREATURE ; 84 

3 BACON 85 

SUICIDES OF BUTLERS 85 

DUELS : 86 

LISTON 88 

STEEPLE-CHASING 89 



CONTENTS. IX 

PAGE 

TURKEYS 90 

BAGPIPES 92 

CAESAR AND BONAPARTE 92 

PSEUDO-CHRISTIANITY 93 

DYED HAIR 95 

EATING 97 

POLAND AND KOSCIUSKO 102 

ENGLAND AND THE POPE (GREGORY) 103 

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON'S CONCERT 105 

WAR, DINNER, AND THANKSGIVING 108 

FIRES AND MARTYRDOM 110 

RESPECTABILITY 113 

USE OF THE WORD " ANGEL," &C. IN LOVE-MAKING 118 

ELOQUENCE OF OMISSION 119 

GODS OF HOMER AND LUCRETIUS 120 

AN INVISIBLE RELIC 120 

A NATURAL MISTAKE 121 

MORTAL GOOD EFFECTS OF MATRIMONY 121 

UMBRELLAS 121 

BOOKSELLERS' DEVICES 123 

WOMEN ON THE RIGHT SIDE 124 

J SHENSTONE MISTAKEN 124 

THE MARSEILLES HYMN 125 

NON-SEQUITUR 126 

NON -RHYMES 127 

STOTHARD 127 

THE COUNTENANCE AFTER DEATH 130 

~A HUME 131 

,JGIBBON 131 

ANGELS AND FLOWERS 132«^ 

AN ENVIABLE DISTRESS 133 

SIR THOMAS DYOT 133 

ANCIENT AND MODERN EXAMPLE 134 

_J>MILTON AND HIS PORTRAITS 138 



x CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

WILLIAM HAT 139 

BISHOP CORBET 140 

HOADLT 141 

> VOLTAIRE „ 141 

HANDEL 142 

MONTAIGNE 144 

WALLER 145 

>OTWAY 146 

RAPHAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO 146 

WAX AND HONEY .* 147 

ASSOCIATIONS WITH SHAKSPEARE 148 

BAD GREAT MEN 149 

CICERO 150 

FLOWERS IN WINTER 150 

l CHARLES LAMB 151 

sporting 153 

wisdom op the head and oe the heart 158 

maecenas „ 158 

lord Shaftesbury's experience of matrimony 159 

a philosopher thrown from his horse 159 

worlds of different people 160 

mrs. siddons 160 

non-necessity of good words to music 163 

GOETHE 163 

BACON AND JAMES THE FIRST 168 

GOLDSMITH'S LIFE OF BEAU NASH 168 

JULIUS CJESAR 169 

FENELON 170 

SPENSER AND THE MONTH OF AUGUST 171 

ADVICE 173 

ECLIPSES, HUMAN BEINGS, AND THE LOWER CREATION 174 

EASTER-DAY AND THE SUN, AND ENGLISH POETRY 176 

THE FIVE-POUND NOTE AND THE GENTLEMAN 179 

PAESIELLO 181 



CONTENTS. XI 

PAGE 

CARDINAL ALBERONI 182 

SIR WILLIAM PETTY THE STATIST AND MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHER 183 

NAME OF LINNAEUS 184 

JOHN BUNCLE (THE HERO OF THE BOOK SO CALLED) 185 

POUSSIN 186 

PRIOR 187 

BURKE AND PAINE 187 

THE DUTCH AT THE CAPE 190 

RUSSIAN HORN BAND 190 

DOGS AND THEIR MASTERS 191 

BODY AND MIND 194 

WANT OF IMAGINATION IN THE COMFORTABLE 194 

THE SINGING MAN KEPT BY THE BIRDS 198 

A STRANGE HEAVEN 200 

STANDING GODFATHER 202 

MAGNIFYING TRIFLES , 203 

RELICS „ 203 

SOLITUDE 204 

LOUIS XIV. AND GEORGE IV 205 

HENRY IV. OF FRANCE AND ALFRED 206 

FELLOWS OF COLLEGES , 206 

BEAUTY A JOY IN HEAVEN 207 v - / 

ASSOCIATIONS OF GLASTONBURY 207 

LIBERTY OF SPEECH 208 

WRITING POETRY 208 

THE WOMEN OF ITALY 209 

FRENCH PEOPLE 209 

THE BLIND 210 

LONDON „ 210 

i southey's poetry 211 

VULGAR CALUMNY 211 

VALUE OF ACQUIREMENTS 212 

THE BEARD 213 

ATTRACTIONS OF HAM 213 



xil CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

SLEEPING UNDER THE SKY 214 

.WAR POETRY 215 

MONEY-GETTING 216 

VALUE OP WORDS 217 

UNWRITTEN REVELATIONS 217 

WEEPING 218 



IMAGINAEY CONVEBSATIONS OF POPE & SWIFT : 

CONVERSATION OF POPE 223 

CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE 243 



cT 




TABLE-TALK 



TABLE - TALK 



Is so natural to man, that the mouth is the organ 
both of eating and speaking. The tongue is set 
flowing by the bottle. Johnson talked best when he 
dined ; — Addison could not talk at all till he drank. 
Table and conversation interchange their metaphors. 
We devour wit and argument, and discuss a turkey 
and chine. That man must be very much absorbed 
in reflection, or stupid, or sulky, or unhappy, or a 
mere hog at his trough, who is not moved to say 
something when he dines. The two men who lived 
with no other companions in the Eddystone Light- 
house, and who would not speak to one another 
during their six months, must have been hard put 



2 TABLE - TALK. 

to it, when they tapped a fresh barrel. To be sure, 
the greater the temptation, the greater the sulk ; but 
the better-natured of the two must have found it a 
severe struggle on a very fine or very foggy day. 

Table-talk, to be perfect, should be sincere with- 
out bigotry, differing without discord, sometimes 
grave, always agreeable, touching on deep points, 
dwelling most on seasonable ones, and letting every- 
body speak and be heard. During the wine after 
dinner, if the door of the room be opened, there 
sometimes comes bursting up the drawing-room stairs 
a noise like that of a tap -room. Everybody is shout- 
ing in order to make himself audible ; argument is 
tempted to confound itself with loudness ; and there 
is not one conversation going forward, but six, or a 
score. This is better than formality and want of 
spirits; but it is no more the right thing, than a 
scramble is a dance, or the tap-room chorus a quar- 
tette of Kossini. The perfection of conversational 
intercourse is when the breeding of high life is ani- 
mated by the fervour of genius. 

Nevertheless, the man who cannot be loud, or 
even vociferous on occasion, is wanting on the jovial 
side of good-fellowship. Chesterfield, with all his 
sense and agreeableness, was but a solemn fop when 



TABLE-TALK. 3 

he triumphantly asked whether anybody had " ever 
seen him laugh?" It was as bad as the jealous 
lover in the play who says, " Have I been the life of 
the company ? Have I made you all die with merri- 
ment ? " And there were occasions, no doubt, when 
Chesterfield might have been answered as the lover 
was, "No: to do you justice, you have been con- 
foundedly stupid." 

Luckily for table-talkers in general, they need 
be neither such fine gentlemen as Chesterfield, nor 
such oracles as Johnson, nor such wits as Addison 
and Swift, provided they have nature and socia- 
bility, and are not destitute of reading and obser- 
vation. 



LADIES CARVING AT DINNER. 

Why doesn't some leader of the fashionable world 
put an end to this barbarous custom ? What a sight, 
to see a delicate little creature, or, worse perhaps, a 
" fine woman," in all the glory of her beauty and 
bedizenment, rise up with a huge knife in her hand, 
as if she were going to act the part of Judith, and 
begin heaving away at a great piece of beef ! For 
the husband does not always think it necessary to 



4 TABLE-TALK. 

take the more laborious dish on himself. Sometimes 
the lady grows as hot and flustered as the housewife 
in the Winter's Tale, "her face o' fire with labour." 
Gentlemen feel bound to offer their services, and 
become her substitutes in that unseemly warfare. 
Why don't they take the business on themselves at 
once ? or, rather, why don't they give it to the ser- 
vants, who have nothing better to do, and who have 
eaten their own meal in comfort ? A side-table is 
the proper place for carving. Indeed, it is used for 
that purpose in some great houses. Why not in 
all ? It is favourable for additional means of keeping 
the dishes hot; nobody at the dinner-table is incon- 
venienced ; and the lady of the house is not made a 
spectacle of, and a subject for ridiculous condole- 
ments. None would regret the reformation but 
epicures who keep on the watch for tidbits, to the 
disadvantage of honest diners ; and whom it would 
be a pleasure to see reduced from shocking oglers 
at the hostess into dependants on the plebeian carver. 

ANOMALIES OF DISHES AND FURNITURE, &c. 

Among the customs at table which deserve to be 
abolished is that of serving up dishes that retain a 



TABLE-TALK. 5 

look of " life in death "—codfish with their staring 
eyes, hares with their hollow countenances, &c. It 
is in bad taste, an incongruity, an anomaly ; to say 
nothing of its effect on morbid imaginations. 

Even furniture would be better without such in- 
consistencies. Claws, and hands, and human heads 
are not suited to the dead wood of goods and chattels. 
A chair should not seem as if it could walk off with 
us; nor a table look like a monstrous three-footed 
animal, with a great flat circular back, and no head. 
It is such furniture as the devil might have had in 
Pandemonium-— 

Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire. 

A lady sometimes makes tea out of a serpent's 
mouth ; and a dragon serves her for a seat in a 
garden. This is making a witch of her, instead of 
a Venus or a Flora. Titania did not sit on a 
toadstool, but on a bank full of wild-thyme and 
violets. 

This bad taste is never more remarkably exempli- 
fied than in the case of fountains. The world seems 
to have given fountains a privilege for exciting incon- 
gruous and filthy ideas ; for nobody, as far as I am 
aware (except Pope, by an implication), has protested 



b TABLE-TALK. 

against their impossible combinations and vomiting 
mouths ; than which nothing surely can be more 
ridiculous or revolting. A fountain should suggest 
nothing but feelings of purity and freshness ; yet they 
go to the reverse extreme, and seem to endeavour to 
make one sick. 



TOPICS FOR DINNER. 

What a thing it is to sit down to dinner, after 
reading of the miseries in starving countries ! One 
fancies one has no right to eat and drink. But the 
thought must be diverted ; — not because the question 
is to be got rid of on every other occasion ; quite the 
contrary; but because having done his best for it, 
great or small, then, and in that case only, the con- 
scientious diner has a right to waive it. Dinner is a 
refreshment, and should be such, if possible, to 
everybody, and most of all to the anxious. Hence 
the topics fittest for table are such as are cheerful, to 
help digestion ; and cordial, to keep people in heart 
with their fellow-creatures. Lively anecdotes are of 
this description, good-humoured personal reminis- 
cences, literary chat, questions as easy to crack as 
the nuts, quotations flowing as the wine, thoughts of 



TABLE - TALK. 7 

eyes and cheeks blooming as the fruit, and beautiful 
as those that have looked at us over the mutual glass. 
The poet says — 

What, and how great, the virtue of the art 

To live on little with a cheerful heart, 

Let's talk, my friends, but talk before we dine ! 

Yes, but not even then, just before we dine. A man's 
in a very bad disposition for living on little before he 
dines. He is much more disposed to do so after- 
wards, particularly if he has eaten too much. The 
time for discussing anxious subjects, especially those 
that regard the poor, is neither at dinner, when the 
topic becomes almost indecent; nor just before it, 
when hunger is selfish ; nor just after it, when the 
feelings are too self-complacent ; but at moments 
when the pulse is lowered, without being too much so 
for reason ; though, indeed, if legislators could be 
kept without their dinners for some two or three 
days, there are occasions when people might be the 
better for it. Members of Parliament hardly see fair 
play between their dinner-bell and the calls of the 
many ; and when the wine is in, the perfection ofwitte- 
nagemot wisdom is apt to be out. The prince in Voltaire 
thought his people happy "when he had dined." 
Quand il avait dine, croyoit son peuple heureux. 



8 TABLE-TALK. 

Luckily, we have princes, and a Parliament too 
(whatever he its faults), that can dine happily, and 
yet not helieve typhus and famine comfortable. 



WILD-FLOWERS, FURZE, AND WIMBLEDON. 

Those flowers on the table are all wild-flowers, 
brought out of ditches, and woodsides, and the 
common ; daisies, and buttercups, ground-ivy, 
hyacinths, violets, furze : they are nothing better . 
Will all the wit of man make anything like them ? 

A. Yes, paintings. 

B. And poetry and music. 

C. True ; but paintings cannot be sown ; they 
cannot come up again every spring, fresh and fresh, 
beautiful as ever. 

A. Paintings are sown by copyists and engravers. 

C. Very true indeed ; but still there is a differ- 
ence. Humphreys is not Correggio ; Linton is not 
Kembrandt; Strange himself is not Titian. The 
immortal painter does not survive in person to make 
even his own reds and blues immortal as his name. 
Yet here is the hyacinth, as fresh as when it was first 
created. Here is Burns's 

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower, 



TABLE - TALK. 9 

as new as if the great peasant had just turned it up 
with his plough. 

B. Poetry seems as if it would last as long as 
flowers ; and it has no need of renewal. 

C. God forbid I should undervalue his most 
wonderful work here on earth, — the creature who can 
himself create. I wonder what they have to resemble, 
or surpass him, in the planets Mercury and Venus ? 
I suppose he gets better and better as he nears the 
sun ; and in the sun is the heaven we are all going 
to ; not the final heaven, but just a kind of celestial 
half-way house ; our own earth made heavenly after a 
human fashion, to enable us to take by degrees to 
beatitude. 

B. There have been worse fancies about the sun 
than that. 

D. Don't condescend to mention 'em.* The very 
best must be unworthy of the orb whose heat and 
light are the instruments for making all these 
beautiful things. And yet, unless you would have 
everything there lilies and roses, can you conceive 
any covering fitter for the hills of the sun itself than 

* Nothing is meant here to he insinuated against speculations 
like those of the Vestiges ; compared with which, nine-tenths of 
all the theology that was ever theologized are but so much ignorant 
and often impious babble. 



10 TABLE-TALK. 

this magnificent furze, as it now appears here in 
England, robing our heaths and commons all over 
the country. 

There is an advertisement in the papers an- 
nouncing a building project at Wimbledon and West- 
hill. The houses are to occupy a portion of Wimble- 
don Park ; and boards are put among the trees by the 
roadside, boasting of the " fine frontage." Well may 
they boast of it, especially at this season of the year. 
It is a golden undulation ; a foreground, and from 
some points of view, a middle distance, fit to make 
the richest painter despair ; a veritable Field of Cloth 
of Gold. Morning (Aurora, the golden goddess), 
when the dawn is of a fineness to match, must look 
beauty for beauty on it. Sunset is divine. The 
gold goes stretching away in the distance towards 
the dark trees, like the rich evening of a poetic 
life. No wonder Linnaeus, when he came to 
England and first beheld this glorious shrub in 
bloom, fell down on his knees, and thanked God that 
he had lived to see it. No wonder statesmen and 
politicians go forth to lodge about the place for a 
little while, to procure air and refreshment ; perhaps 
to get a new lease of existence ; perhaps to die where 
they may still find something beautiful on earth — 



TABLE-TALK. 11 

beautiful enough to comfort their mistakes about it, 
and to prepare them for a place where it is easier to 
look for flowers than revolutions. As to figures in 
the landscape, they are not many, nor discordant ; 
such as a horse or two, a few cattle, now and then a 
horseman, or a sturdy peasant on foot, or a beauty in 
a barouche. Sometimes the peasant is aged, but 
hale ; or sturdy, though but a child ; — signs both of 
good air, and prosperity, and a true country spot. I 
hardly know which is the more picturesque sight, — a 
fine ruddy-cheeked, little peasant-boy, not beyond 
childhood, coming along with a wheelbarrow full of 
this golden furze, his face looking like a bud a-top of 
it ; or a bent, hearty, old man (bent with age, not 
with his perquisite) carrying off a bunch of it on his 
back, as if he triumphed over time and youth. 

Sometimes you meet a lady coming with a bunch 
of hyacinths, sometimes a fine young fellow of a 
gentleman, who has not disdained to stick a bit of 
furze in his coat. It is not the love of flowers that 
makes people effeminate ; but in-door habits that 
produce a craving for stimulants and dread of trouble. 
This very Wimbledon Park was once occupied by a 
cultivator, and even painter of flowers, whom nobody 
that didn't know him, and beheld at his gentle tasks, 



12 TABLE-TALK. 

would have suspected to have been General Lambert, 
one of the boldest and most independent of the officers 
of Cromwell. He lived there in the interval between his 
rival's elevation to sovereign power and the return of 
Charles the Second, and was famous for the sums he 
gave for his pinks and tulips. 

MISTAKES OF THE PRESS. 

The annals of law and typography contain the 
remarkable fact that an edition of the Bible was once 
printed, in which the word not, to the horror and 
consternation of the religious world, was left out of 
the seventh commandment ! — They called for its 
restoration with an impatience more creditable to 
their zeal than their sense of security ; while, on the 
other hand, some daring theologians (who, like the 
Catholics, did not think themselves tied in every 
respect to those letters of the old law) doubted 
whether, for the sake of the commandment itself, the 
omission had not better remain as it was, seeing that 
" in nine cases out of ten, the prohibition was the 
temptation." 

Mistakes of the press have given rise to such 
ludicrous combinations, that a small wit (Caleb 



TABLE-TALK. 13 

Whitford) obtained a reputation solely by a few 
articles about them in a newspaper. I never, in the 
course of my own experience, met with one of a more 
astounding aspect than the following. It is innocent 
of all scandal, or libel, or double meaning. It was a 
pure mistake of the printer, ludicrously unintelligible, 
and threw the readers into agonies of conjecture. 
The writer had observed that, " although there is no 
mention either of coffee or tobacco in the Arabian 
Nights, the former, from association of ideas with 
existing Eastern manners, always reminded him of 
that delightful book ; " and then followed this extra- 
ordinary sentence — " as sucking does for the snow 
season" 

This mistake was so high, abundant, and 
ridiculous, that, if I remember rightly (for the article 
was my own), I refused to correct it. I thought it 
better to leave it as it stood, for a perpetual pleasure 
of astonishment to all who might chance to light 
upon the pages in which it occurred. 

The proper words, however, were these : — " as 
smoking does for the same reason" 



14 TABLE-TALK. 

MAY-TIME. 

Such a delightful commencement as we have had 
of the month of May, is a perfect godsend ; for our 
climate is seldom so lucky. May is a pretty word ; 
a charming thing in books and poets; beautiful 
always in some degree to look at, as far as hedges 
and trees go, whatever be the state of the weather ; 
that is to say, provided you can quit the fireside, and 
the windows are not too misty with rain to see through. 
But the hedges in general succeed better than the 
skies. There is apt to be more blossom than sun- 
shine ; and people lie in bed on May-morning, and 
wonder what possessed their ancestors, to induce 
them to get up at dawn, and go poking about the wet 
bushes. 

I suspect it was never very easy to reckon upon a 
fine May- day in England. If the wind was in a good 
quarter, the chances were that it rained ; and if the 
sky was clear, then probably the wind was in the east. 

Kough winds do shake the darling buds of May, 

says a lovely verse in Shakspeare. Our ancestors, 
however, had more out-of-door habits than we, and 
seem to have cared little for east-winds. You hear a 



TABLE-TALK. 15 

great deal more of north-winds than east in the old 
writers. At the same time we must not forget, that 
our May-day comes nearly a fortnight sooner with us 
than it did with them. The change took place when 
the calendar was altered, ahout a hundred years hack ; 
and the consequence was, that the May-day of our 
ancestors now falls on the twelfth of the month. 
The circumstance gave rise to some verses by Mr. 
Lovibond, a gentleman " about town " in the days of 
Chesterfield and Walpole, which the subject (and the 
prevailing bad taste in verses) rendered popular. 
They were called The Tears of old May-day, This is 
the way in which Mr. Lovibond laments : — 

Onward in conscious majesty she came, 

(To wit, poor May) — 

The grateful honours of mankind to taste, 
To gather fairest wreaths of future fame, 

(What is the meaning of that ?) 

And blend fresh triumphs with her glories past. 

Vain hope ! No more in choral bands unite 

Her virgin vot'ries ; and at early dawn, 
Sacred to May and Love's mysterious rite, 

Brush the light dew-drops from the spangled lawn. 

To her no more Augusta's wealth?/ pride 

Pours the full tribute from Potosi's mine ! ! 
Nor fresh-blown garlands village maids provide, 

A purer offspring at her rustic shrine, &c. &c. 



16 TABLE-TALK. 

What does the reader take to have heen " the full 
tribute from Potosi's mine ? " It was the plate which 
the milkmaids used to borrow to decorate their 
May-pole. 

Compare with this stuff the fresh, impulsive verses 
and bright painting of Spenser : — 

Then came fair May, the fairest maid on ground, 

Deck'd all with dainties of her season's pride, 
And throwing flowers out of her lap around. 

Upon two brethren's shoulders she did ride, 
The twins of Leda : which, on either side, 

Supported her, like to their sovereign queen. 
Lord ! how all creatures laugh' d when her they spied; 

And leap'd and danc'd as they had rarish'd been ; 
And Cupid's self about her fluttered all in green. 

If people, then, have a mind to try the proper old 
May-day, and be up and out of doors among the 
blossoms when Shakspeare was, or Spenser's Eosalind, 
or the pretty queen of Edward the Fourth (for royalty 
used to go a-Maying once), next Tuesday is their 
time, supposing the weather favourable, and good folks 
"in a concatenation accordingly." Only they must 
take care how they are too merry ; otherwise, they 
will wake the Tractarian old lady next door, who will 
think the world is going to be at an end, if people are 
not as sleepy and stupid as herself. 



TABLE-TALK. 17 



MALICE OF FORTUNE. 



Mr. Green, the aeronaut, has had an escape from 
a death which would have looked like a mockery. 
He was near being killed by his balloon, not aloft in 
the clouds, or by a descent like Phaeton ; but in a cart 
in which he was riding upon it, like the Welshman on 
his cheese in the Splendid Shilling. Mr. Green's 
courage is to be congratulated on not having brought 
him to so mock-heroical a pass. The greatest trick 
of this sort ever played by Fortune was the end of 
Bruce the traveller, who, after all his perils by flood 
and by field, from wars, from wild beasts, from deserts, 
from savage nations, broke his neck down his own 
staircase at home ! It was owing to a slip of the 
foot, while seeing some visitors out whom he had 
been entertaining. 

This was the very anti-climax of adventure. 

BISHOPS AND BRAHMINS. 

I hold the Church of England in great respect fof 
Several reasons. One is, that it lets me hold my own 
form of Christian opinion without molestation ; 
another, that having reformed itself once, and to 

2 



18 TABLE-TALK. 

no little extent — it can do so again, I have no doubt, 
and would to-morrow, if it had its free way, and so 
give the coup de grace in this country to the last 
pretences of Popery. A third reasonis, that its clergy, 
upon the whole, and considering their number, are the 
best behaved, most learned and most reasonable, 
most gentle, most truly Christian, in Europe ; the 
occasional excesses of individuals among them, how- 
ever enormous, being far less than the crimes and 
catastrophes of those in Catholic nations ; originating 
in causes which need not be dwelt upon. 

But the reasonableness[and well-tempered security 
of ordinary clerical existence in this country, give rise 
in some instances to scandals, injurious in proportion 
to their very seeming warrant. 

Why do bishops, who won't go to theatres, accept 
invitations to public dinners ? They had much 
better be seen at the representation of Lear or 
Macbeth than at a Lord Mayor's feast. It has an 
unseemly look at any time, especially in your fat 
bishop, and most especially when the reports of the 
feast in the newspapers are followed by accounts of 
the starving poor. If such tremendous inequalities 
in the social condition are not to be remedied, why 
mortify the sufferers ? And if they are, why exaspe- 



TABLE-TALK. 19 

rate them? Keports of public dinners, let the 
guests be who they may, harmonize ill with those of 
the police-office and the Poor-Laws ; but when 
bishops are among the diners, the scandal is 
doubled, and one is astonished they do not see it. 
But a bishop seems to see nothing else, when a 
dish is before him. Observe — the world would have 
no objection to his being fat and jolly, if he made no 
saintly pretensions ; or if he could square it with 
appearances in other respects, and his duties to the 
unfed. There is F., who is as fat as any one of 
them, and who has brains and activity enough for 
the whole bench. If they could all bestir themselves 
in behalf of the poor as he does, and manifest as 
unclouded an intellect, I am not sure the public 
would not rejoice in their obesity, and regard it as 
the right and privilege of those who endeavoured to 
spread a table for mankind. Who could have 
grudged his fat to Berkeley ? or to Luther ? or to 
good Bishop Jewel (if he had it) ? or to that pattern 
of a prelate, who thought it a shame to have a 
hundred pounds in the hands of his steward ? But 
when bishops and their families grow rich, while the 
poor grow poorer, and when it is the rarest thing in 
the world (with the exception, now and then, of a 



20 TABLE-TALK. 

Thirlwall or a Stanley,) to find them attending a 
public meeting but for selfish or corporate purposes, 
people naturally dislike to see them fat and feeding, 
especially when they come in the lump together, as 
at these Lord Mayor's feasts. Bishops should never 
appear in flocks, like vultures. There is an adver- 
tiser of after-dinner pills, who recommends the drug- 
by long lists of his patrons, including almost the 
whole of the right reverend bench. The sight is 
laughable, to say the least of it. Many honest 
friends of the Establishment think it deplorable. It 
is a positive proclamation of excess ; an ostentation 
of apoplexy ; a telling the world, that to be a bishop 
and to want boxes of pills is the same thing. Or if 
we are to take it as a mere matter of indifference and 
nonchalance, it becomes so much the worse. 

Advertiser (asking permission to boast of his 
"favours"). "My Lord Bishop, may I tell the 
world what good my pills do to your lordship's 
indigestion ? " 

Bishop. " Oh, certainly." 

The Hindoo gentry have a custom among them 
of giving feeds to their bishops, the Brahmins. It 
is a fashion — an emulation — and practised on great 
family occasions. Every nobleman tries how he can 



TABLE-TALK. 21 

outdo the rest of his class in the number of reverend 
personages he can get together, and the amount of 
food he can induce them to swallow. If only six 
Brahmins are brought to the verge of apoplexy, he 
thinks himself ruined in the eyes of his neighbours. 
What will the world say if there is no sickness ? 
How can he hold up his head, should no clergyman 
be carried away senseless? Accordingly, towards 
the end of the entertainment, the host may be seen 
(this is no fiction) literally beseeching their lordships 
the Brahmins to get down another plate of curry. 

"I've eaten fourteen," says one of them, gaspiDg. 

"And I fifteen," says another. 

"For God's sake," says the host. 

"Impossible," says the Brahmin. 

" But consider, my dear lord, you ate seventeen 
at Earn Bulkee's." 

" You are misinformed, my dear sir." 

" Pardon me, they were counted to his immortal 
honour." 

" Thirteen only, on — my — sacred word." 

" Don't favour me less, I implore you. See — 
only this one other mouthful." 

" Impracticable." 

" I've rolled it up, to render it the more easy." 



22 TABLE-TALK. 

" Consider my jaws." 

" But, dear lord " 

" Have pity on my cesophagus- 
" But my name, my name— — 



" My — dear — son, stomachs have their limits." 
"But not your lordship's generosity." 
Wife {interposing). " It will be the death of my 
husband, if you don't oblige him." 

" Well, this one — (swallowing). Ah — my— dear 
— son ! — (aside to himself). Why did our caste 
establish this custom ? It might have been salutary 
once ; but now ! — Ram ! Ram ! I can bear it no 
longer." 

One other mouthful, however, still is got down, 
the host is a man of such meritorious wealth ; yet he 
was obliged to implore it with tears in his eyes. The 
Brahmins in vain pointed to their own. The host, 
with inexorable pathos, entreats them to consider the 
feelings of his wife and children. The mouthful is 
achieved, Ram Bulkee beaten, and the reverend 
feasters are carried off to bed, very nearly victimized 
by "the wisdom of their ancestors" and clarified 
butter. 

Such are the inconveniences that may arise from 
customs of our own contriving ; and such the corporate 



TABLE-TALK. 23 

resemblances among the priesthood of the most 
distant countries, which Christian bishops might do 
well to avoid. 



THE "BLESSED RESTORATION." 

The public are beginning to show symptoms of 
dislike to the anniversary of what is equivocally 
called the Blessed Restoration, and the retention of 
it in so grave a place as the church. The objection 
is not new ; but it comes with new force at a time 
when some antics of superstition have induced the 
growing intelligence of the community to look at the 
abuses of religion in general, and to wish to see it 
freed from every species of scandal. People have 
certainly been in the habit of taking strange 
occasions for expressing their gratitude to Heaven ; 
and this "Blessed Restoration" is not one of the 
least extraordinary ; at all events, the retention of it 
as a sacred day is extraordinary, when we consider 
how long it is since the character of Charles and 
his court have been a by-word. But the custom 
was retained for the same reason that set it up— 
not to thank God, but to spite those who differed. 
The gusto of the gratitude was in proportion to the 



24 TABLE-TALK. 

sufferings of the enemy. Cromwell thanked G od for 
the head of Charles the First on a scaffold, and 
Charles the Second thanked God for the head of 
Cromwell on a gibbet. The defenders of the anniver- 
sary, if they spoke the truth, would have vindicated 
themselves on the plea that they did not thank God 
for Charles at all. To thank Him for Charles 
would have been to thank Him for Cleveland and 
Buckingham ; for the pension from the French king, 
and all sorts of effronteries and enormities. Oh, 
no; the decorous men hated those. It was for no 
vice they hated him. It was for the virtuous 
pleasure of galling their neighbours, and of doing 
honour to Mother Church herself, who condescended 
to be led back to her seat by the hand of the gay 
deceiver. 

Now, Mother Church on that occasion was not 
the right, unpapal, unpuritanical, unsophisticate 
Mother Church, old as no church at all, and ever 
young as advancement ; but one of her spurious 
representatives ; and society is awaking to the neces- 
sity of having no more such masqueraders, but seeing 
the beautiful, gentle, altogether Christian creature as 
she is, professing nothing that she does not believe, 
and believing nothing that can offend the wisest. 



TABLE- TALK. 25 

Tillotson, Berkeley, Whichcote, Lave had sight of 
her. Charles the Second's chaplains knew no more 
of her than Dr. Philpotts. 

THE SUN. 

No mystery in creation need sadden us, as long as 
we believe nothing of the invisible world inferior to 
what the visible proclaims. Life and geniality pre- 
dominate ; death is brief ; pain fugitive ; beauty 
universal ; order paramount and everlasting. "What 
a shame, to know that the sun, the greatest visible 
object in our universe, combines equal gentleness 
with power, and does us nothing but good, and at 
the same time to dare to think worse of its Maker ! 



BON-MOT OF A COACHMAN. 

Commendation beforehand is usually but a bad 
preface to a jest, or to anything else ; yet I must say 
that I never heard anything more to the purpose 
than the reply made to a shabby fellow by the driver 
of an omnibus. Shabby, on hailing the omnibus, 
had pathetically intimated that he had not more than 
a shilling, so that he could not pay the whole fare, 



26 TABLE-TALK. 

which was eight eenpence. This representation in 
forma pauperis the driver good-naturedly answered 
by desiring the gentleman to get in. The journey 
being ended, Shabby, who had either been too loud 
in his pathos before the passengers, or too happy in 
the success of it, to think of getting change from 
them as he went (for it is manifest, from what fol- 
lowed, that he knew he had more than he pretended), 
was forced to develop from his purse a criminatory 
half-crown / This solid body of self-refutation, with- 
out pretending any surprise on his own part at the 
possession of it, and thus availing himself of an 
obvious opportunity, he hands to the coachman with 
a dry request for the difference. The coachman, still 
too good-natured to take any verbal notice of the 
pleasing apparition, but too wise not to do himself 
justice, returns twelvepence to Shabby. Shabby 
intimates his expectation of the sixpence. 

Coachman. My fare, you know, sir, is eighteen- 
pence. 

Shabby. Yes ; but you said I was to ride for a 
shilling. 

Coachman. I did ; but you gave me to understand 
that you had no more in your pocket. 

Shabby. A bargain's a bargain. 



TABLE-TALK. 27 

Coachman. Well, then, sir, to tell you the truth, 
you must know that I am the greatest liar on the 
road. 



SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE. 

The question respecting the mirth or melancholy 
of the nightingale, which of late years is supposed 
to have been settled in favour of the gayer side by 
some fine lines of Coleridge's, surely resolves itself 
into a simple matter of association of ideas. Chaucer 
calls the notes of the bird "merry;" but the word 
merry, in Chaucer's time, signified something alive 
and vigorous after its kind; as in the instance of 
" merry men " in the old ballads, and " merry Eng- 
land ;" which did not mean a nation or set of men 
always laughing and enjoying themselves, but in good 
hearty condition ; a state of manhood befitting men. 
This point is determined beyond a doubt by the same 
poet's application of the word to the organ, as the 
" merry organ," — meaning the c/rarc/i-organ, which, 
surely, however noble and organic, is not merry in 
the modern sense of the word. 

The whole matter I conceive to be this. The 
notes of the nightingale, generally speaking, are not 



28 TABLE-TALK. 

melancholy in themselves, but melancholy from asso- 
ciation with night-time, and from the grave reflections 
which the hour naturally produces. They may be 
said to be melancholy also in the finer sense of the 
word (such as Milton uses in his Penseroso), inasmuch 
as they express the utmost intensity of vocal beauty 
and delight ; for the last excessive feelings of delight 
are always grave. Levity does not do them honour 
enough, nor sufficiency acknowledge the appeal they 
make to that finiteness of our nature which they 
force unconsciously upon a sense of itself, and upon 
a secret feeling of our own capabilities of happiness 
compared with the brevity of it. 

OVID. 

Ovid was the son of a Koman knight, had an easy 
fortune, and (to use a modern phrase) was one of the 
gayest and most popular men about town in Rome 
for nearly thirty years ; till, owing to some mysterious 
offence given to the court of Augustus, which forms 
one of the puzzles of biography, he was suddenly 
torn from house and home, without the least intima- 
tion, in the middle of the night, and sent to a remote 
and wintry place of exile on the banks of the Danube. 



TABLE - TALK. 29 

Ovid was a good-natured man, tall and slender, with 
more affections than the levity of his poetical gal- 
lantry leads us to suppose. His gallantries are worth 
little, and have little effect ; but his Metamorphoses 
are a store of beautiful Greek pictures, and tend to 
keep alive in grown people the feelings of their boyhood. 

THE VOICE OF THE BOOK. 

The Saxon word rook "and the Latin word mucus 
(hoarse) appear to come from the same root ; though 
it is curious that neither Latins nor Italians have a 
name for the rook, distinct from that of crow or 
raven, as the English have. The same sense, how- 
ever, of the hoarseness of the bird's voice seems to 
have furnished the names of almost all the Corvican 
family, — crow, rook, raven, daw, corvus and comix 
(Latin), korax (Greek). When the rook is men- 
tioned, nobody can help thinking of his voice. It is 
as much identified with him, as bark with the old 
trees. But why do naturalists never mention the 
kindly chuckle of the young crows? particularly 
pleasant, good-humoured, and infant-like ; as differ- 
ent from the rough note of the elders, as peel is 
from bark, or a baby's voice is from that of a man. 



30 TABLE-TALK. 

HOW LAWYEES GO TO HEAVEN. 

There is a pleasant story of a lawyer, who, being 
refused entrance into heaven by St. Peter, contrived 
to throw his hat inside the door ; and then, being 
permitted by the kind saint to go in and fetch it, 
took advantage of the latter's fixture as doorkeeper, 
to refuse to come back again. 



COLLINS, THE POET. 

In Mr. Pickering's edition of Collins, there is an 
engraved likeness of the poet, the only one that has 
appeared. Nothing is said for its authenticity : it is 
only stated to be " from a drawing formerly in the 
possession of William Seward, Esq. ; " but it possesses, 
I think, internal evidence of its truth, being clouded, 
in the midst of its beauty, with a look of pride and 
passion. There is also a thick-stuffed look in the 
cheeks and about the eyes, as if he had been overfed ; 
no uncommon cause, however mean a one, of many 
a trouble in after life. 

The dreadful calamity which befell the'poet has 
generally been attributed to pecuniary distresses 
occasioned by early negligence, or at least to habits 



TABLE-TALK. 31 

of indolence and irresolution which grew upon him. 
His biographer, in this edition, says, with great 
appearance of justice, that the irresolution was always 
manifest, and he attributes the calamity to a weakness 
of mind that was early developed. But whence arose 
the weakness of mind ? It is desirable, for the common 
interests of mankind, that biographers should trace 
character and conduct to their first sources ; and it 
is little to say, that a weakness was the consequence 
of a weakness. Collins's misfortune seems to have 
originated in the combined causes of delicacy of bodily 
organization, want of guidance on the part of relations, 
and perhaps in something of a tendency on their 
part to a similar malady. His father, a hatter, is 
described as being [' a pompous man ; " his sister 
pushed avarice and resentment to a pitch of the 
insane ; the father died, while his son was a boy, the 
mother not long afterwards ; his uncle, Colonel 
Martin, though otherwise very kind, seems to have 
left him to his own guidance. The poet was so 
delicately organized, that in early life he expected 
blindness ; and this ardent and sensitive young man, 
thus left to himself, conscious of great natural 
powers, which he thought he might draw upon at a 
future day, and possessing the natural voluptuousness 



32 TABLE-TALK. 

of the poetical temperament, plunged into debt and 
pleasure beyond recovery, and thus, from a combina- 
tion of predisposing circumstances, lost his wits. I 
think it discernible that he had his father's pride, 
though in better taste ; and also, that he partook of 
his sister's vehemence, though as generous as she 
was stingy. We learn from Sir Egerton Brydges, 
that notwithstanding his delicacy of temperament, 
his shrieks were sometimes to be heard from the 
cloisters in Chichester to such an excess as to become 
unbearable. " Poor dear Collins ! " we involuntarily 
exclaim with Dr. Johnson : — how much we owe, 
pity, and love him ! One can love any man that is 
generous ; one pities Collins in proportion as he has 
taught us to love Pity herself ; and I for one owe 
him some of the most delightful dreams of my child- 
hood. Of my childhood, do I say ? Of my manhood 
— of my eternityhood, I hope ; for his dreams are fit 
to be realized in the next world. 

" Thy form," says he, in his Ode to Pity, speak- 
ing of the God of War : — 

Thy form from out thy sweet abode 

O'ertook him on his blasted road, 

And stopp'd his wheels, and look'd his rage away ! 

How did this passage, by the help of the pretty design 



TABLE-TALK. 83 

by Mr. Kirk in Cooke's edition of the poets, affect 
me, and help to engage my heart for ever in the 
cause of humanity ! An allegory may be thought a 
cold thing by the critics ; but to a child it is often 
the best representation of the truth which he feels 
within him, and the man is so far fortunate who feels 
like the child. I used to fancy I saw Pity's house 
on the road-side, — a better .angel than those in 
Bunyan, — and the sweet inmate issuing forth, on 
one of her dewy mornings, to look into the eyes 
of the God of War and turn him from his purpose. 

If Collins had married and had a family, or been 
compelled to write not only for himself but others, 
it is probable that the morbidity of his temperament 
would have been spared its fatal consequences : th e 
necessity of labour might have varied his thoughts, 
and sympathy turned his very weakness into strength. 
A good heart can hardly be conscious of belonging to 
many others, and not distribute itself, as it were, 
into their being, and multiply its endurance for their 
sake. But Collins might have had such an opinion 
of his disease, as to think himself bound to remain 
single. 

It does not appear that the greatest understand- 
ings, through whatever dangers they may pass from 

3 



34 TABLE-TALK. 

excess of thought, are liable to be finally borne down 
by it. They seize upon every help, and acquire the 
habit of conquest. But I suspect Collins to have 
been not only of a race overstocked with passion, but 
a spoiled child, habituated to the earliest indulgence 
of his feelings ; and the infirmity may have become 
so strong for him, as to render such a piece of self- 
denial at once the most painful and most reasonable 
of his actions. One retires with reverence before the 
possibility of such a trial of virtue; and can only 
end with hoping, that the spirit which has given such 
delight to mankind is now itself delighted. 

A FACT. 

The powers of the printing-press are very extra- 
ordinary ; yet the imaginations even of the dull can 
outstrip them. A woman, I have been told, 
absolutely went into a bookseller's shop, said she 
was going further, and requested to have a Bible 
which sho'uld be " small in size, large in type, and 
printed by the time she came back." — It was to a 
similar application that a bookseller replied, "I see 
what you want, Madam ; a pint-pot that will hold a 
quart." More things of this kind have been related, 



TABLE-TALK. 35 

probably with truth ; for there are as many strange 
truths of ignorance as of knowledge. 



THE TWO CONQUERORS. 

When Goethe says that in every human condition 
foes lie in wait for us, " vincible only by cheer- 
fulness and equanimity," he does not mean that we 
can at all times be really cheerful, or at a moment's 
notice ; but that the endeavour to look at the better 
side of things will produce the habit ; and that this 
habit is the surest safeguard against the danger of 
sudden evils. 



CLERICAL TITLES. 

It is a pity that the clergy do not give up the 
solemn trifling of some of their titles. Their titular 
scales and gradations of merit become very ludicrous 
on inspection. Thus you may have a reverence for a 
curate of an apostolical life, supposing it possible to 
have it for a poor man ; but you can have no right 
reverence. A bishop is the only man who is " Right 
Reverend." The curate cannot even be " Vener- 
able," however he may be venerated. It is the 



36 TABLE-TALK. 

Archdeacon that is venerable. Again, a Prebendary 
is not Most Keverend, though he is Very : the Dean 
is the only man that is Most Reverend. There is a 
prevailing reverence in the Prebendary : he is valde 
reverendus ; but the Dean is filled and saturated and 
overflowing with venerability ; he is superlatively 
reverend, — reverendissimiis. These distinctions often 
take place in the same man, in the course of a 
minute. An Archdeacon for instance is dining, and 
has just swallowed his sixty-ninth mouthful. During 
which operation he was only Venerable. A messenger 
comes in, and tells him that he is a Dean; upon 
which he spills the gravy for joy, and is Most 
Reverend. 



HORACE WALPOLE AND PINKERTON. 

Pinkerton was a man of an irritable and over- 
weening mediocrity. His correspondence with Beattie, 
Percy and others, is curious for little more than the 
lamentable evidence they afford of the willingness of 
grave men to repay the flatteries of a literary tyro, in 
a style which unquestionably did Mr. Pinkerton great 
harm in after life, and which is quite enough to 
account for the height of presumption to which it 



TABLE - TALK. 37 

suffered his irritability to carry him. Those of 
Horace Walpole, who contributed to the mischief, 
are the best. Like all the letters of that celebrated 
person, whose genius was a victim to his rank, they 
are remarkable for their singular union of fine sense, 
foppery, and insincerity. He praises Mr. Pinkerton 
desperately at first; then gets tired of him, and 
mingles his praise with irony : Mr. Pinkerton finds 
out the irony, and complains of it ; upon which the 
man of quality has the impudence to vow he is 
serious, and proceeds to hoax him the more. 

One of Mr. Pinkerton' s fantastic contrivances to 
supply his want of originality, was a speculation for 
improving the English tongue, by the addition of 
vowels to its final consonants. The number of final 
s's in our language is certainly a fault. It is a pity 
we do not retain the Saxon plural termination in en, 
which we still have in the word oxen, — as housen for 
houses, &c. But as changes for the worse grow out 
of circumstances, so must changes for the better ; 
especially upon points on which the world can feel 
themselves but feebly interested. What would the 
Stock Exchange care for consolso instead of consols ? 
or the poor for breado, if they could but get bread? 
or even a lover, who has naturally a propensity to 



68 TABLE-TALK. 

soft words, for a faira brida, provided lie has the 
lady ? Yet upon improvements no wiser than these 
did Mr. Pinkerton and his correspondents busy 
themselves. One of them talks of quieto nyto, 
meaning a quiet night : and honesta shepherda and 
shepherdeza ! 

Pinkerton sometimes encouraged Walpole himself 
to get in a fantastic humour. Peter Pindar says, — 

My cousin Pindar in his odes 
Applauded horse-jockies and gods. 

Walpole expressed a serious opinion that a new 
Pindar might do likewise, — that all the English 
games might be rendered poetical like those of the 
ancients, — forgetting the differences of occasion, 
custom, religion, and a totally different state of 
society. A serious panegyric on a gentleman's horse 
might undoubtedly be well received by the owner, 
and the poet invited to dinner to hear a delicious 
conversation on bets and chances ; but a ballad would 
do better than an ode. The latter would require 
translation into the vulgar tongue. 



TABLE-TALK. 89 

JEWS. 

In our thoughts of old-clothesmen and despised 
shop-keepers, we are accustomed to forget that the 
Jews came from the East, and that they still partake 
in their blood of the vivacity of their Eastern origin. 
We forget that they have had their poets and philo- 
sophers, both gay and profound, and that the great 
Solomon was one of the most beautiful of amatory 
poets, of writers of Epicurean elegance, and the 
delight of the whole Eastern world, who exalted him 
into a magician. There are plentiful evidences, in- 
deed, of the vivacity of the Jewish character in the 
Bible. They were liable to very ferocious mistakes 
respecting their neighbours, but so have other nations 
been who have piqued themselves on their refine- 
ment ; but we are always reading of their feasting, 
dancing and singing, and harping and rejoicing. 
Half of David's imagery is made up of allusions to 
these lively manners of his countrymen. But the 
Bible has been read to us with such solemn faces, 
and associated with such false and gloomy ideas, that 
the Jews of old become as unpleasant though less 
undignified a multitude in our imaginations as the 
modern. We see as little of the real domestic interior 



40 TABLE-TALK. 

of the one as of the other, even though no people 
have been more abundantly described to us. The 
moment we think of them as people of the East, this 
impression is changed, and we do them justice. 
Moses himself, who, notwithstanding his share of the 
barbarism above mentioned, was a genuine philoso- 
pher and great man, and is entitled to our eternal 
gratitude as the proclaimer of the Sabbath, is rescued 
from the degrading familiarity into which the word 
Moses has been trampled, when we read of him in 
D'Herbelot as Moussa Ben Amran ; and even Solomon 
becomes another person as the Great Soliman or 
Soliman Ben Daoud, who had the ring that com- 
manded the genii, and sat with twelve thousand 
seats of gold on each side of him, for his sages and 
great men. 

SMOLLETT. 

Though Smollett sometimes vexes us with the 
malicious boy's-play of his heroes, and sometimes 
disgusts with his coarseness, he is still the Smollett 
whom now, as in one's boyhood, it is impossible not 
to heartily laugh with. He is an accomplished 
writer, and a masterly observer, and may be called 



TABLE-TALK. 41 

the finest of caricaturists. His caricatures are always 
substantially true : it is only the complexional vehe- 
mence of his gusto that leads him to toss them up 
as he does, and tumble them on our plates. Then 
as to the objections against his morality, nobody will 
be hurt by it. The delicate and sentimental will 
look on the whole matter as a joke ; the accessories 
of the characters will deter them : while readers of a 
coarser taste, for whom their friends might fear most, 
because they are most likely to be conversant with 
the scenes described, are, in our opinion, to be 
seriously benefited by the perusal ; for it will show 
them, that heroes of their description are expected to 
have virtues as well as faults, and that they seldom 
get anything by being positively disagreeable or bad. 
Our author's lovers, it must be owned, are not of the 
most sentimental or flattering description. One of 
their common modes of paying their court, even to 
those they best love and esteem, is by writing 
lampoons on other women ! Smollett had a strong 
spice of pride and malice in him (greatly owing, we 
doubt not, to some scenes of unjust treatment he 
witnessed in early youth), which he imparts to his 
heroes ; all of whom, probably, are caricatures of 
himself, as Fielding's brawny, good-natured, idle 



42 TABLE-TALK. 

fellows are of him. There is no serious evil intention, 
however. It is all out of resentment of some evil, 
real or imaginary ; or is made up of pure animal 
spirit and the love of venting a complexional sense of 
power. It is energy, humour, and movement, not 
particularly amiable, but clever, entertaining, and 
interesting, and without an atom of hypocrisy in it. 
No man will learn to be shabby by reading Smollett's 
writings. 

CHEMISTRY. 

We eat, drink, sleep, and are clothed in things 
chemical ; the eye that looks at us contains them ; 
the lip that smiles at the remark is coloured by them ; 
we shed tears (horribile dictu /) of soda-water. But 
we need not be humiliated. Eoses and dew-drops 
contain the same particles as we : custom cannot 
take away the precious mystery of the elements : the 
meanest compounds contain secrets as dignified as 
the most lofty. The soul remains in the midst of 
all, a wondrous magician, turning them to profit and 
beauty. 

A good book about chemistry is as entertaining 
as a romance. Indeed, a great deal of romance, in 



TABLE-TALK. 43 

every sense of the term, has always been mixed up 
with chemistry. This most useful of the sciences 
arose out of the vainest ; at least the art of making 
gold, or the secret of the philosopher's stone (for 
chemistry originally meant nothing more), has 
hitherto had nothing to show for itself but quackery 
and delusion. What discoveries the human mind 
may arrive at, it is impossible to say. I am not for 
putting bounds to its possibilities, or saying that no 
Columbuses are to arise in the intellectual world, 
who shall as far surpass the other as the universe 
does our hemisphere. But meanwhile chemistry 
supplied us with food for romances, before it took to 
regulating that of the stomach, or assisting us in the 
conquest of the world material. We owe to it the 
classification and familiar intimacy of the Platonical 
world of spirits, the Alchemists of Chaucer and Ben 
Jonson, partly even of the Rape of the Lock. Para- 
celsus's Daemon of the stomach was the first that 
brought the spiritual and medical world into contact : 
in other words, we owe to that extraordinary person, 
who was an instance of the freaks played by a great 
understanding when it is destitute of moral sensi- 
bility, the first application of chemical knowledge to 
medicine. The amiable and delightful Cullen, in 



44 TABLE - TALK. 

whom an extreme humanity became a profound wis- 
dom (and the world are still to be indebted to him 
in morals as well as physics), was the first who 
enlarged the science into the universal thing which 
it is now. This was not a hundred years ago. To 
what a size has it not grown since, like the vapoury 
giant let out of the casket ! 

PETTY CONVENIENCES AND COMFORTS. 

The locks and keys, and articles on a par with 
them, in Tuscany, are, perhaps, the same now that 
they were in the days of Lorenzo de' Medici. The 
more cheerful a nation is in ordinary, or the happier 
its climate, the less it cares for those petty conveni- 
ences, which irritable people keep about them, as a 
set-off to their want of happiness in the lump. A 
Koman or a Tuscan will be glad enough to make use 
of an English razor when he gets it ; but the point 
is, that he can do better without it than the English- 
man. We have sometimes seen in the face of an 
Italian, when English pen-knives and other perfec- 
tions of manufacture have been shown him, an 
expression, mixed with his wonder, of something 
like paternal pity, as if the excess of the thing was 



TABLE- TALK. 45 

childish. It seemed to say, — " Ah, you can make 
those sort of things, and we can do without them. 
Can you make such knicknacks as Benvenuto 
Cellini did, — carkanets and caskets, full of exquisite 
sculpture, and worth their weight in jewels ? " 

And there is reason in this. It is convenient to 
have the most exquisite penknives ; but it is -a 
greater blessing to be able to do without them. No 
reasonable man would stop the progress of manufac- 
ture, for a good will come of it beyond what is con- 
templated. But it is not to be denied, meanwhile, 
that the more petty conveniences we abound in, the 
more we become the slaves of them, and the more 
impatient at wanting them where they are not. Not 
having the end, we keep about us what we take for 
the means. Cultivators of better tempers or happier 
soils get at the end by shorter cuts. The only real 
good of the excessive attention we pay to the con- 
veniences of life is, that the diffusion of knowledge, 
and the desire of advancement, proceed in company 
with it; and that happier nations may ultimately 
become still happier by our discoveries, and improve 
us, in their turn, by those of their livelier nature. 



46 TABLE-TALK, 

TEARS. 

Sympathizing and selfish people are alike given 
to tears, if the latter are selfish on the side of per- 
sonal indulgence. The selfish get their senses into 
a state to be moved by any kind of excitement that 
stimulates their languor, and take a wonderful degree 
of pity on themselves : for such is the secret of their 
pretended pity for others. You may always know it 
by the fine things they say of their own sufferings on 
the occasion. Sensitive people, on the other hand, 
of a more generous sort, though they cannot always 
restrain their tears, are accustomed to do so, partly 
out of shame at being taken for the others, partly 
because they can less afford the emotion. The sensi- 
tive selfish have the advantage in point of natural 
strength, being often as fat, jolly people as any, with 
a trick of longevity. George IV., with all his tears, 
and the wear and tear of his dinners to boot, lasted 
to a reasonable old age. If he had been shrewder, 
and taken more care of himself, he might have lived 
to a hundred. But it must be allowed, that he would 
then have been still more selfish than he was ; for 
these luxurious weepers are at least generous in 
imagination. They include a notion of other people 



TABLE - TALE. 47 

somehow, and are more convertible into good people 
when young. The most selfish person we ever met 
with, was upwards of a hundred, and had the glorious 
reputation of not being moveable by anything or any- 
body. He lasted, as a statue might last in a public 
square ; which would see the whole side of it burn, 
with moveless eyes, and bowels of granite. 

DR. ALDEICH. 

Aldrich, Dean of Christchurch, built some well- 
known and admired structures at Oxford ; was a 
musician as well as architect; wrote the famous 
Smoking Catch (being accomplished in the smoking 
art also) ; was the author of Hark ! the bonny Christ- 
church Bells, a composition of great sprightliness 
and originality ; and has the reputation of being an 
elegant Latin poet. His Latin verses are to be met 
with in the Musce Anglicance ; but we do not remem- 
ber them, unless the following hexameters be among 
the number : — 

Si bene quid memini, causae sunt quinque bibendi : 
Hospitis adventus, praesens sitis, atque futura, 
Aut vini bonitas, aut quaelibet altera causa, 

Which has been thus translated, perhaps by the 



48 TABLE-TALK. 

author, for the version is on a par with the origi- 
nal : — 

If on my theme I rightly think, 
There are five reasons why men drink : 
Good wine, a friend, or being dry, 
Or lest we should be by-and-by, 
Or any other reason why. 



LORD MARCHMONT'S RECEIPT FOR LONGEVITY. 

Lord Marchmont, the friend of Pope, lived to the 
age of eighty-six, preserving his strength and facul- 
ties to the last. He rode out only five days before he 
died. Sir John Sinclair, who knew him, wished to 
ascertain the system he pursued, and received for 
answer, that his lordship always lived as other people 
did, but that he had laid down when young one 
maxim, to which he rigidly adhered, and to which he 
attributed much of his good health, namely : — 

Now, what do you think this maxim was ? Never 
to exceed in his eating? No. Never to lie late in 
bed ? No. Never to neglect exercise ? Never to 
take much physic? Never to be rakish, to be 
litigious, to be ill-tempered, to give way to passion ? 
No, none of these. It was 

Never to mix his Wines. 

What luxurious philosophies some people have ! 



TABLE-TALK. 49 

My Lord Marchmont was resolved to be a long- 
lived, virtuous, venerable man ; and therefore lie laid 
it down as a maxim, Never to mix bis wines. To get 
one glass of wine, in tbeir extreme weakness, is what 
some buman beings, bent double with age, toil, and 
rheumatism, can seldom hope for ; while another of 
the race, having nothing to bend him and nothing to 
do, shall become a glorious example of the beauty of 
this apostolical maxim, — " Never to mix your wines." 
Lord Marchmont did accordingly for many years 
generously restrict himself to the use of claret ; but 
his physicians having forbidden him to take that wine 
on account of its acidity, he resolved, with equal self- 
denial, to " confine himself to Burgundy ; " and 
accordingly, with a perseverance that cannot be 
sufficiently commended, he " took a bottle of it every 
day for fifteen years." 

The noble lord was a good man, however, and his 
" neat, as imported," is not to be grudged him. All 
we have to lament is, that thousands, as good as he, 
have not an atom either of his pleasure or his 
leisure. 



50 TABLE-TALK. 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 

There is something in the history of the American 
Revolution extremely dry and unattractive. This is 
owing partly perhaps to the moneyed origin of it, 
partly to the want of personal anecdotes, to the 
absence of those interesting local and historical 
associations which abound in older states, and to the 
character of Washington; who, however admirable a 
person, and fitted as if by Providence to the task 
which he effected, was himself, personally, of a 
dry and unattractive nature, an impersonation of 
integrity and straightforwardness, exhibiting none of 
the social or romantic qualities which interest us in 
other great men. For similar reasons, the American 
Indians are the least interesting of savages. Their 
main object has been to exhibit themselves in an 
apathetic or stoical character, and they have suffered 
in human sympathy accordingly. 



DISCOVERERS OF AMEBICA, 

It is painful to reflect on the calamitous circum- 
stances under which these high-minded adventurers 
were accustomed to terminate their careers, however 



TABLE-TALK. 51 

brilliant their successes by the way. They got riches 
and territory for others, and generally died in 
poverty, often of wounds and disease, sometimes by 
the hands of the executioner. Pinzon, who first 
crossed the equinoctial line in the New Hemisphere 
and discovered Brazil, got nothing by his voyage of 
discovery but heavy losses. Nicuesa disappeared, 
and was supposed to have perished at sea. Valdivia 
was killed and eaten by cannibals. Ponce de Leon, 
who thought to discover the fountain of youth, died 
of a wound exasperated by mortified pride and 
disappointment. The lofty and romantic Don 
Alonzo de Ojeda died so poor, that he did not leave 
money enough to provide for his interment ; and so 
broken in spirit, that with his last breath he 
entreated that his body might be buried in the 
monastery of San Francisco, just at the portal, in 
humble expiation of his past pride, that " every one 
who entered might tread upon his grave." And 
Vasco Nunez de Balboa, one of the best of the old 
brotherhood, perished on the scaffold, a victim, like 
Columbus, to envy. It is to be recollected, however, that 
such men accomplish the first object of their ambition 
— renown ; and that life, and not death, is the main 
thing by which we are to judge of their happiness. 



52 TABLE-TALK. 

WONDER NEVER CEASES. 

It might be thought that the progress of science 
would destroy the pleasure arising from the perusal 
of works of fiction, by showing us the mechanical 
causes of phenomena, and so leading us to conclude 
that the utmost wonders we could imagine might 
with equal reason be referred to similar causes. In 
other words, no wonder is greater than any other 
wonder : and, if once explained, ceases to be a 
wonder. " Wonder," it has been said, " is the effect 
of novelty upon ignorance." Perhaps it would have 
been said better, that wonder is the effect of want of 
familiarity upon ignorance : for there are many 
things that excite our wonder, though far from new 
to us or to our reflections ; such as life and death, 
the phenomena of the planets, &c. But to say 
nothing of the inexhaustible stock of novelties, 
wonders could never cease in anything, till we knew 
their first as well as their final causes. We must 
understand how it is that substance, and motion, 
and thought exist, before we can cease to admire 
them : the very power of writing a fairy tale is as 
great a wonder as anything it relates : and thus 
while we think to frighten away the charms of fable 



TABLE - TALK. 53 

and poetry with the sound of our shuttles and steam- 
engines, they only return the more near to us, settle 
smiling on the very machinery, and (to say nothing 
of other sympathies) demand admiration on the very 
same grounds. 

DALY, THE DUBLIN MANAGER. 

Daly, patentee of the Dublin Theatre, was one of 
those iron-hearted and brazen-faced blackguards, who, 
in an age when knowledge is on the increase, are not 
so likely to be taken for clever fellows as they used to 
be ; being in fact no other than scoundrels in search 
of a sensation, and willing to gratify it, like wild 
beasts, at the risk of any price to the sufferer. Such 
fellows do not abound with courage : they merely 
have one of an honourable man's drawbacks upon 
ferocity. To talk of their other gallantry would be 
equally preposterous. Even of animal impulse they 
know no more than others. They only know no 
restraint. Give a man good health, and take from 
him all reflection, and every spark of love, and you 
have the human wild beast called Daly. His best 
excuse was his squint. There was some smack of 
salvation in that, for it looks as if he resented it, 



54 TABLE-TALK, 

" Richard Daly, Esq., patentee of the Dublin 
Theatre" (says Boaden's Life of Mrs. Jordan), "was 
born in the county of Galway, and educated at Trinity 
College : as a preparation for the course he intended 
to run through life, he had fought sixteen duels in 
two years ; three with the small-sword and thirteen 
with pistols ; and he, I suppose, imagined, like Mac- 
beth, with equal confidence and more truth, that he 
bore a ' charmed life ; ' for he had gone through the 
said sixteen trials of his nerve without a single wound 
or scratch of much consequence. He, therefore, used 
to provoke such meetings on any usual and even 
uncertain grounds, and entered the field in pea-green, 
embroidered and ruffled and curled, as if he had been 
to hold up a very different ball, and gallantly pre- 
sented his full front, conspicuously finished with an 
elegant brooch, quite regardless how soon the labours 
of the toilet ' might soil their honours in the dust.' 
Daly, in person, was remarkably handsome, and his 
features would have been agreeable but for an in- 
veterate and most distressing squint, the conscious- 
ness of which might keep his courage eternally upon 
the look-out for provocation ; and not seldom, from 
surprise alone, afford him an opportunity for this his 
favourite diversion. Like Wilkes, he must have been 



TABLE-TALK. 55 

a very unwelcome adversary to meet with the sword, 
because the eye told the opposite party none of his 
intentions. Mr. Daly's gallantry was equal at least 
to his courage, and the latter was often necessary to 
defend him in the unbridled indulgence that through 
life he permitted to the former. He was said to be 
the general lover in his theatrical company ; and, I 
presume, the resistance of the fair to a manager may 
be somewhat modified by the danger of offending one 
who has the power to appoint them to parts, either 
striking or otherwise ; and who must not be irritated, 
if he cannot be obliged. It has been said, too, that 
any of his subjects risked a great deal by an escape 
from either his love or his tyranny ; for he would put 
his bond in force upon the refractory, and condemn 
to a hopeless imprisonment those who, from virtue or 
disgust, had determined to disappoint him." 

LIGHT AND COLOUKS. 

Light is, perhaps, the most wonderful of all 
visible things ; that is to say, it has the least analogy 
to other bodies, and is the least subject to secondary 
explanations. No object of sight equals it in tenuity, 
in velocity, in beauty, in remoteness of origin, and 



56 TABLE - TALK. 

closeness of approach. It has " no respect of per- 
sons." Its beneficence is most impartial. It shines 
equally on the jewels of an Eastern prince, and on 
the dust in the corner of a warehouse. Its delicacy, 
its power, its utility, its universality, its lovely essence, 
visible and yet intangible, make up something god- 
like to our imaginations ; and though we acknowledge 
divinities more divine, we feel that ignorant as w T ell 
as wise fault may be found with those who have made 
it an object of worship. 

One . of the most curious things with regard to 
light is, that it is a body, by means of which we 
become sensible of the existence of other bodies. It 
is a substance ; it exists as much in the space between 
our eyes and the object it makes known to us, as it 
does in any other instance; and yet we are made 
sensible of that object by means of the very substance 
intervening. When our inquiries are stopped by 
perplexities of this kind, no wonder that some awe- 
stricken philosophers have thought further inquiry 
forbidden ; and that others have concluded, with 
Berkeley, that there is no such thing as substance 
but in idea, and that the phenomena of creation exist 
but by the will of the Great Mind, which permits 
certain apparent causes and solutions to take place, 



TABLE-TALK. 57 

and to act in a uniform manner. Milton doubts 
whether he ought to say what he felt concerning 
light :— 

Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born, 
Or of the eternal coeternal beam, 
May I express thee unblamed ? since God is light, 
And never but in an unapproached light 
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt there in thee, 
Bright effluence of bright essence increate. 

And then he makes that pathetic complaint, during 
which we imagine him sitting with his blind eyes in 
the sun, feeling its warmth upon their lids, while he 
could see nothing :— 

Thee I revisit safe, 
And feel thy sovran vital lamp ; but thou 
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain 
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn. 

As colour is imparted solely by the different rays 
of light with which they are acted upon, the sun 
liter ally paints the flowers. The hues of the pink 
and rose literally come, every day, direct from heaven. 



VERSIONS OF ANCIENT LYRICS. 

The more we consider Anacreon and the ancient 
lyrics, the more probable it seems that some degree 
of paraphrase is necessary, to assimilate them in 



58 TABLE - TALK. 

effect to the original. We are to recollect, that the 
ancient odes were written to he sung to music ; that 
the poet himself was the first performer; and that 
the idea of words and music was prohahly never 
divided in the mind of the reader. The spirit of 
enjoyment is a spirit of continuousness. We may 
suppose what we like of Greek simplicity and brevity, 
especially in their epigrams or inscriptions, the 
shortness of which was most likely prescribed, in the 
first instance, by the nature of the places on which 
they were written : but we may be pretty certain, 
that the shortest of Anacreon's songs was made three, 
or four, or five times as long as it appears to us, by 
the music with which it was accompanied. Take a 
song of Metastasio's, as set by Arne or Mozart, and 
we shall find the duration of it a very different thing 
in the study and the theatre. The only true way, 
therefore, of translating an ode of Anacreon, is to 
sympathize as much as possible with his animal 
spirits, and then to let the words flow as freely as 
they will, with as musical and dancing a melody as 
possible, so as to make the flow and continuity of the 
verse as great a substitute as possible for the accom- 
paniment of the lyre. The only versions of Anacreon, 
in the English language, that are really worth any- 



TABLE-TALK. 59 

thing, are those of Cowley ; and these are as para- 
phrastic as they are joyous. 



CATHEEINE THE SECOND OF RUSSIA. 

As long as she had everything her own way, 
Catherine could be a very pleasant, vain, debauched, 
fat-growing, all-tolerant mistress, interchanging little 
homages with the philosophers : but as soon as 
philosophy threatened to regard the human race as of 
more consequence than one woman, adieu to flattery 
and to France. The French then were only worthy 
of being " drubbed." 

Catherine was a clever German, with a great 
deal of will, among a nation of barbarians. This is 
the clue to her ascendency. In a more southern 
country she would probably have been little thought 
of, in comparison with what she was reputed as the 
" mother " of her great clownish family of Kussians. 

Note. — That the arbitrary have always had a 
tendency to grow fat, for the same reason that 
inclines them to be furious. The same people who 
can deny others everything, are famous for refusing 
themselves nothing. 



60 TABLE-TALK. 

PETRARCH AND LAURA. 

There is plenty of evidence in her lover's poetry, 
to show that Laura portioned out the shade and 
sunshine of her countenance in a manner that had 
the instinctive effect of artifice, though we do not 
believe there was any intention to practise it. And 
this is a reasonable conclusion, warranted by the 
experience of the world. It is not necessary to 
suppose Laura a perfect character, in order to excite 
the love of so imaginative a heart as Petrarch's. A 
good half, or two-thirds of the love, may have been 
assignable to the imagination. Part of it was 
avowedly attributable to the extraordinary fidelity 
with which she kept her marriage vow to a disagree- 
able husband, in a city so licentious as Avignon, and, 
therefore, partook of that not very complimentary 
astonishment, and that willingness to be at an 
unusual disadvantage, which makes chastity cut so 
remarkable a figure amidst the rakeries of Beaumont 
and Fletcher. Furthermore, Laura may have not 
understood the etherialities of Petrarch. It is pos- 
sible that less homage might have had a greater 
effect upon her; and it is highly probable (as 
Petrarch, though he speaks well of her natural 



TABLE - TALK. 61 

talents, says she had not been well educated,) that 
she had that instinctive misgiving of the fine qualities 
attributed to her, which is produced, even in the 
vainest of women, by flights to which they are unac- 
customed. It makes them resent their incompe- 
tency upon the lover who thus strangely reminds 
them of it. Most women, however, would naturally 
be unwilling to lose such an admirer, especially as 
they found the admiration of him extend in the 
world : and Laura is described by her lover as mani- 
festly affected by it. Upon the whole, I should 
guess her to have been a very beautiful, well-meaning 
woman, far from insensible to public homage of any 
sort (she was a splendid dresser, for instance), and 
neither so wise nor so foolish as to make her seri- 
ously responsible for any little coquetries she prac- 
tised, or wanting in sufficient address to practise 
them well. Her history is a lofty comment upon the 
line in the Beggars' Opera, — . 

By keeping men off, you keep them on. 

As to the sonnets with which this great man 
immortalized his love, and which are full of the most 
wonderful beauties, small and great (the versification 
being surprisingly various and charming, and the 



62 TABLE - TALK. 

conceits of which they have been accused being for 
the most part as natural and delightful as anything 
in them, from a propensity which a real lover has to 
associate his mistress with everything he sees), justice 
has been done to their gentler beauties, but not, I 
think, to their intensity and passion. Romeo should 
have written a criticism on Petrarch's sonnets. He 
would have done justice both to their " conceits " 
and their fervour. I think it is Ugo Foscolo who 
remarks, that Petrarch has given evidence of passion 
felt in solitude, amounting even to the terrible. His 
temperament partook of that morbid cast which 
makes people haunted by their ideas, and which, in 
men of genius, subjects them sometimes to a kind 
of delirium of feeling, without destroying the truth 
of their perceptions. Petrarch more than once 
represents himself in these sonnets as struggling 
with a propensity to suicide ; nor do we know any- 
thing more affecting in the record of a man's struggles 
with unhappiness, than the one containing a prayer 
of humiliation to God on account of his passion, 
beginning 

Padre del ciel, dopo i perduti giorni — 
(Father of heaven, after the lost days). 

The commentators tell us that it was written on a 



TABLE-TALK. 63 

Good Friday, exactly eleven years from the commence- 
ment of his love. 



MORAL AND PERSONAL COURAGE. 

In all moral courage there is a degree of personal ; 
personal is sometimes totally deficient in moral. The 
reason is, that moral courage is a result of the in- 
tellectual perceptions and of conscience; whereas a 
man totally deficient in those, may have nerves or 
gall enough to face any danger which his hody feels 
itself competent to oppose. When the physically 
courageous man comes into the region of mind and 
speculation, or when the question is purely one of 
right or wrong, he is apt to feel himself in the con- 
dition of the sailor who confessed that he was afraid 
of ghosts, because he " did not understand their 
tackle." When moral courage feels that it is in the 
right, there is no personal daring of which it is in- 
capable, 

TIGHT-LACING. 

It is a frequent matter of astonishment, why 
females should persist in tight-lacing when so much 



64 TABLE-TALK. 

is said against it, and how it happens that they should 
take what is really a deformity for something hand- 
some. The first part of this mystery is answered by 
the second : they think the waist produced by tight- 
lacing a beauty ; and the reason why they think so 
is that they know a small waist to be the object of 
admiration, and they feel that they can never persuade 
you it is small without forcing the smallness upon 
your eyes, and thus forcing you to acknowledge it. 
On the contrary, the spectator feels that if the waist 
were really small, so much pains would not be taken 
to convince him of it. But this the poor creatures 
will not consider. Every one thinks that there will 
be an exception in her favour. Other women, she 
allows, make themselves ridiculous, and attempt to 
impose upon us ; — with herself the case is different : — 
everybody must see that her waist is really small. 
Therefore she goes lacing and lacing on, till she 
becomes like a wasp ; and everybody who follows her 
in the street laughs at her. 

Some of these waists are of such frightful tenuity, 
as to strike the least thinking "observer with their 
ugliness. The other day there was a young lady 
walking before me in the street, whose waist literally 
seemed no thicker than a large arm. The poor girl 



TABLE-TALK. 65 

had marked herself for death. Some of the most 
vital parts of her body must have been fairly lapped 
over one another, or squeezed into a mass. My first 
sensation, on seeing this phenomenon, was horror at 
the monstrosity ; the second was vexation with the 
poor silly girl ; the third was pity. The ground of 
the stupid custom is sympathy, however mistaken. 
The poor simpletons wish for our admiration, and do 
not know how hard they try to gain our contempt. 
"We ought to be the less provoked, because in all 
these yearnings after social approbation, there is the 
germ of a great preferment for the community ; since 
the same people, who now make themselves so ridicu- 
lous, and get so much death and disease, by pursuing 
false means of obtaining our good opinion, would, in a 
wiser state of society, be led as vehemently to adopt 
the true. Instead of going about half-stifled with bad 
vitals and ready-made coroner's inquests, the poor 
creatures would then be anxious to show us that they 
were natural healthy females, fit to be wives and 
mothers. At present, if they can be mothers at all, 
it is frightful to think what miseries they may inflict 
on their offspring. 



66 TABLE-TALK. 

GRAVITY AND INDUSTRY OF DANCERS. 

One of Addison's happy papers in the Spectator 
(and how numerous they are !) contains an account of 
a mysterious personage, who, lodging at the same 
house as his observer and making a great noise one 
day over his head, was watched by some of his fellow- 
lodgers through the key-hole. They observed him 
look gravely on a book, and then twirl round upon 
one leg. He looked gravely again, and put forth his 
leg in a different manner. A third time he fell to 
studying profoundly, and then, darting off with 
vivacity, took a career round the room. The conclu- 
sion was, if I remember, that he was some mad 
gentleman. The peepers, however, ventured in, and 
upon inquiry found that he was a dancing-master. 
The Spectator, who had joined them, concluded by 
requesting, that the gentleman would be pleased in 
future to addict himself with less vehemence to his 
studies, since they had cost him that morning the 
loss of several trains of thought, besides breaking a 
couple of tobacco-pipes. 

They who have seen the grave faces and lively 
legs of some of the opera- dancers, can easily under- 
stand the profundities of this master of their art ; nor 



TABLE-TALK. 67 

will they fall into the mistake of young people in 
supposing that a dancer has nothing to do but to be 
lively and enjoy himself. M. Blasis, the author of a 
work on the art, says that the dancer must be always 
practising, otherwise he is in danger of losing what 
he has acquired. Some muscle will get out of prac- 
tice, ^ome shiver of the left-leg be short of perfection. 
Furthermore, he must follow neither " simple un- 
practised theorists," nor the " imaginary schemes of 
innovating speculators." He must also be temperate 
and sober; nay, must "partially renounce every 
pleasure but that which Terpsichore affords ; " must 
not think of horsemanship, fencing, or running ; 
must study the antique, drawing, and music, but 
particularly his own limbs ; and if he aspire to the 
composition of ballets, must have a profound know- 
ledge of the drama and of human nature. See now, 
you who reflect but little, how much it takes to bring 
a man to a right state of pirouette ; what a world of 
accomplishment there is in that little toe, which 
seems pointed at nothing; and what a right the 
possessor of it has to the grave face which has so often 
puzzled conjecture. He seems to be merely holding 
the tip of a lady's finger : but who is to know what is 
passing through his mind ? 



68 TABLE-TALK. 

"Use your endeavours/' saith Blasis, "to twirl 
delicately round on the points of your toes." Here 
we feel in a state of anxiety, with a world of labour 
before us. In another sentence, one hardly knows 
in what sense we are to take his words, whether as 
an encouragement to tranquillity of mind, or an 
injunction to acquire lissomness in the body. " Make 
yourself easy," quoth he, " about your hips." 

ADVERTISEMENTS. 

Advertisements are sometimes very amusing. 
They give insights into the manners of the times no 
less interesting than authentic. Suppose the ancients 
had possessed a press, and that a volume of a Roman 
Post or Chronicle had been dug up at Herculaneum, 
with what curiosity should we not contemplate the 
millinery of the Roman ladies, or, " Wanted a 
Gladiator to light the last new lion ; " or, "Next Ides 
of November will be published the new poem of 
Quintus Horatius Flaccus" or a long account of a 
court-day of Nero or Antoninus ! The best editions 
of the Taller and Spectator have very properly 
retained a selection of the Advertisements. 



TABLE-TALK. 69 

SPORTSMEN AND CUSTOM. 

There are unquestionably many amiable men 
among sportsmen, who, as the phrase is, would not 
" hurt a fly," — that is to say, on a window. At the 
end of a string, the case is altered. So marvellous 
are the effects of custom and education. Consol- 
ing thought, nevertheless ! for if custom and educa- 
tion have been so marvellous in reconciling intelligent 
men to absurdities, and humane men to cruelty, 
what will they not effect, when they shall be on the 
side of justice ? when reason, humanity, and enjoy- 
ment, shall become the three new graces of the 
civilized world ? It has been said that absurdities 
are necessary to man ; but nobody thinks so who is 
not their victim. With occupation, leisure, and 
healthy amusement, all the world would be satisfied. 

BEARS AND THEIR HUNTERS. 

It is natural in bear-hunters, who have witnessed 
the creature's ravages, and felt the peril of his approach, 
to call him a ferocious animal, and gift him at times 
with other epithets of objection ; but we who sit in 
our closets, far removed from the clanger, may be 



70 TABLE-TALK. 

allowed to vindicate the character of the bear, and to 
think that Brain, who is only labouring in his vocation, 
and is not more ferocious than hunger and necessity 
make him, might, with at least equal reason, have 
advanced some objections against his invader. He 
might have said, if he possessed a little JEsopean 
knowledge of mankind, "Here, now, is a fellow com- 
ing to kill me for getting my dinner, who eats 
slaughtered sheep and lobsters boiled alive; who, 
with the word/ ferocity ' in his mouth, puts a ball into 
my poor head, just as the highwayman vindicates 
himself by abusing the man he shoots ; and who then 
writes an account of his humane achievement with a 
quill plucked from the body of a bleeding and scream- 
ing goose." 

Or, knowing nothing of mankind, he might say, 
" Here comes that horrid strange animal to murder 
us, who sometimes has one sort of head and some- 
times another (hat and cap), and who carries another 
terrible animal in his paw — a kind of stiff snake — 
which sends out thunder and lightning ; and so he 
points his snake at us, and in an instant we are filled 
with burning wounds, and die in agonies of horror and 
desperation." 

There is much resemblance to humanity in the 



TABLE-TALK. 71 

bear. I would not make invidious comparisons ; but 
travellers as well as poets have given us beautiful 
accounts of the maternal affections of the bear ; and 
furthermore, the animal resembles many respectable 
gentlemen whom we could name. When he wishes 
to attack anybody he rises on his hind legs, as men do 
in the House of Commons. He dances, as aldermen 
do, with great solemnity and weight ; and his general 
appearance, when you see him walking about the 
streets with his keeper, is surely like that of many a 
gentleman in a great-coat, whose enormity of appetite 
and the recklessness with which he indulges it, entitle 
him to have a keeper also. 



SELF-STULTIFICATION. 

The highest, most deliberate, peremptory, and 
solemn instance perhaps on record, of this species of 
absurdity, is the dismissal of his court-fool, Archibald 
Armstrong, by Charles the First in council. Archy, 
as he was called, had given mortal offence to Laud, by 
ridiculing his attempts at church-domination. It is 
related of him that he once said, by way of grace 
before dinner, " Great praise to the King, and Little 
Laud to the devil." But the last feather that broke 



72 TABLE-TALK. 

the back of the Archbishop's patience was Archibald 
saying to him, on the failure of his liturgy in Scotland, 
" Who's fool now ? " Laud complained to Charles; 
Charles summoned his council to take cognizance of 
the dreadful matter ; and accordingly, at " Whitehall, 
on the eleventh of March, one thousand six hundred 
and thirty-seven, present the King's most Excellent 
Majesty, the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, the 
Lord Keeper, Lord Treasurer, Lord Privy Seal," and 
fourteen other great personages, Archibald Armstrong, 
" the King's fool," for certain scandalous words, of a 
" high nature," and "proved to be uttered by him 
by two witnesses," was sentenced to have "his coat 
pulled over his ears," and discharged from his 
Majesty's service. 

What was this but saying, that the fool was a fool 
no longer ? " Write me down an ass," says Dog- 
berry in the comedy. Write down, that Archy is no 
fool, says King Charles in council — he has called the 
Archbishop one ; and therefore we are all agreed, the 
Archbishop included, that the man has proved 
himself to be entitled no longer to the appellation. 



TABLE-TALK. 73 



COWSLIPS. 



A country-girl, the other clay, expressed her 
astonishment that ladies could see anything to admire 
in "cowslips." Now, here was an instance of the 
familiarity that breeds contempt. Cowslips are 
among the most elegant of the spring flowers. 
They look, with those pretty sleeves of theirs, like 
ladies themselves in their morning dresses. But 
the country-girl had been accustomed to see whole 
fields of them, and to associate them with wet and 
mire, and Farmer Higgins. 

Shakspeare mentions cowslips seven times, prim- 
roses just as often, and violets fourteen. He says 
nothing of anemones or hyacinths. I gather this 
from Mrs. Clarke's Concordance ; which, besides 
being admirably what it professes to be, suggests 
curious speculations as to the greater or less likings 
of Shakspeare, his habitual associations of ideas, 
&c. ; — and it might be made subservient to interest- 
ing inquiries on those subjects. 



74 TABLE - TALK. 



APKIL FOOLS. 



An anniversary of this kind, in which stultifica- 
tion is the order of the day, appears to take place, 
ahout the same time of the year, all over the civilized 
world. Yet it would look more like a custom 
originating in some one particular country, than 
most of those which are thought to have had such 
commencements ; for it is as difficult not to imagine 
ordinary holidays and superstitions the natural 
growth of every human community, as it would 
he to suppose that all the world, at one particular 
season, agreed to make fools of one another without 
knowing it. 

There are solemn people whose dignity cannot 
hear to he disturbed, let the season be never so full 
of gaiety. It is such a fragile and empty pretension, 
they are afraid that the least touch will knock it to 
pieces. Not so with the wiser. They rejoice in 
every good which Nature has bestowed on them, 
mirth included ; and are only baulked by the 
presence of the incompetent. The celebrated Dr. 
Clarke was once amusing himself at some merry 
pastime with some youths of his college, when he 
suddenly left off at the sight of one of the fellows. 



TABLE-TALK. 75 

"Hush, boys," said he, " we must be quiet. Here's 
a fool coming." 

I must tell you a story of a friend of mine, 
which I take to be a crowning specimen of April fool- 
making. 

Down comes this father of a family one April 
Day to breakfast, with a face looking at once amused 
and confounded, as if something had happened to 
him both pleasant and mortifying. The mother of 
the family asks the reason, and all his children's 
eyes are turned on him. He looked, at first, as if he 
did not like to speak ; but on being pressed, assumed 
an aspect of bold acknowledgment, and said, "Well, 
my dear, you know I am not particular on April 
Days, but, certainly, I did not think that Harriet 
(one of the servants) would have gone so far as this." 

"What is it?" 

" Why, she has made an April fool of me ! ! I 
was coming down the stairs, when she requested me 
to have a care of a broom that was lying at the 
bottom of it. There was no broom, and she ran 
away laughing." 

" Well," cries the lady, " of all the bold girls 
I ever met in my life, that Harriet has the greatest 
effrontery." 



76 TABLE-TALK. 

The children all joined in the astonishment. 
They never heard of such a thing. It was wonderful, 
shameful, &c, but they could not help laughing, and 
the roar became universal. 

" My dear," said Harry, gravely, " and you, all 
of you merry young ladies and gentlemen, I have the 
pleasure of informing you, all round, and at one fell 
swoop, that you are a parcel of April fools." 

PRIVATE WAR. 

In the times when duels were fought with 
swords, the Dutch had a pretty custom (perhaps 
have it still in sequestered places, where virtue 
survives) in which two rustical parties, whenever 
they happened to have an argument over their beer, 
and couldn't otherwise settle it, took out the knives 
with which they had been cutting their bread and 
cheese, and went to it like gentlemen. It was called 
snick-and-snee, which is understood to mean catch 
and cut, the parties catching hold of one another by 
the collar or waistcoat, and thus conveniently sneeing 
or cutting away, as butchers might do at a carcase. 
A similar custom is related of the Highlanders, who, 
whenever they sat down together to dinner, were so 



TABLE-TALK. 77 

prepared for it, that in case of accidents, that is to 
say of arguments, they stuck their dirks into the 
board beside their trenchers, so as to have their 
reasons ready at hand. If a man said, " You grow 
hot and ridiculous," out came the cold steel to 
disprove his words ; and the question was settled 
upon the most logical military principles. 

Now, if private and public virtue are identical, as 
moralists insist they are, in contradiction to the 
casuists of expediency, there is no reason why the 
disputes of individuals should not be settled like 
those of nations, in the good old Dutch and High- 
land manner. But, at the same time, as moralists 
and casuists alike agree in thinking that the more 
the system of war can be humanized the better, I 
can't but think that an obvious mode presents itself 
of showing the resort to bloodshed in its best and 
most reasonable colours — a light at once conclusive 
and considerate, humane yet valiant, elegant in the 
accessories, yet as no-nonsense and John Bull-like as 
the perfection of reason can desire. War, observe, is 
a very filthy as well as melancholy thing. There can 
be no doubt of that. And, therefore, on the no- 
nonsense principle, the fact is not to be disguised. 
People, it is true, do disguise it; writers of des- 



78 TABLE-TALK. 

patches disguise it ; even Wellington says little or 
nothing about it, which I have always thought the 
only blot on the character and candour of that great 
man. But I am sure that, on reflection, and con- 
sidering how un-English-like such insincerity is, the 
Duke would give up the concealment after his usual 
manly fashion. 

My plan is this : — that whenever two gentlemen, 
alive to the merits and necessities of war, should 
happen to have a dispute over their wine, they should 
immediately put on two laced hats, call in a band of 
music from the streets, and after hearing a little of 
it, and marching up and down the room with an air 
of dignified propriety, fall to it with their fists, and 
see which can give the other the most logical bloody 
nose. The sight of blood adding to the valour of 
the combatants, the noses of course would get worse 
and worse, and the blows heavier and heavier, till 
both of the warriors reasonably became " sights," 
and one of the two at last fell insensible — that being 
an evil necessary to the termination of the argument. 
Meantime, they would groan considerably, and com- 
plain in a very touching manner of the kicks and 
cuffs they received on the tenderest parts of their 
bodies (to show that there was "no nonsense"); a 



TABLE - TALK, 79 

great dust would be struck up from the carpet ; pools 
of blood would properly overflow it (always to show 
that there was " no nonsense") ; and then, when the 
fight was over, and the band of music had played 
again, and the shrieks in the drawing-room and 
kitchen had subsided into those tears and sobs which 
are the final evidences of a state of logical conviction, 
the conqueror (if he was able), or his friends at all 
events, would clear their throats in the most dignified 
manner, strike up a hymn, and thank the author of 
their respective vitalities that the defeated party had 
been beaten to a jelly, to the special satisfaction of 
the beater, and the eternal honour and glory of the 
Author of the Universe. 

N.B. — You must be cautious how you doubt 
whether the Author of the Universe takes any par- 
ticular notice of the bloody noses, or whether he does 
not rather leave them to work out some different 
third purpose by themselves ; because, in that case, 
you might be charged with wanting a due sense of 
his dignity. On the other hand, you must not at all 
imagine that he approves the bloody noses in the 
abstract as well as concrete ; because, in that case, 
you would be charged with doubting his virtue. And, 
again, you are not to fancy that Heaven wishes to 



80 TABLE-TALK. 

put an end to the bloody noses altogether ; for that 
would be quite opposed to the principle of "no non- 
sense." 

Your business is to preach love to your neighbour, 
to kick him to bits, and to thank God for the contra- 
diction. 



BEAUMARCHAIS. 

Beaumarchais, author of the celebrated comedy of 
Figaro, an abridgment of which has been rendered 
more celebrated by the music of Mozart, made a large 
fortune by supplying the American republicans with 
arms and ammunition, and lost it by speculations 
in salt and printing. His comedy is one of those 
productions which are accounted dangerous, from 
developing the spirit of intrigue and gallantry with 
more gaiety than objection ; and they would be more 
undeniably so, if the good-humour and self-examina- 
tion to which they excite did not suggest a spirit of 
charity and inquiry beyond themselves. 



TABLE-TALK. 81 



MOZART. 



Mozart is wonderful for the endless variety and 
undeviating grace of his invention. Yet his wife 
said of him, that he was a still better dancer than 
musician ! In a soul so full of harmony, kindness 
towards others was to be looked for; and it was 
found. When a child, he would go about asking 
people " whether they loved him." When he was a 
great musician, a man in distress accosted him one 
day in the street, and as the composer had no money 
to give him, he bade him wait a little, while he went 
into a coffee-house, where he wrote a beautiful minuet 
extempore, and, sending the poor man with it to the 
music-seller's, made him a present of the proceeds. 
This is the way that great musicians are made. Their 
sensibility is their genius. 

VIOLET— WITH A DIFFERENCE. 

"Violet" is thought a suitable name for the 
sweetest heroines of romance, on account of its asso- 
ciation with the flower ; yet add but a letter to it, 
and that not a harsh one, and it becomes the most 
nnfeminine of characteristics — Violent. 

6 



82 TABLE-TALK. 

VERBAL MISTAKES OF FOREIGNERS. 

The Abbe Georgel, having to send a dinner- 
invitation to Hume from Prince Louis de Rohan, 
took the opportunity of impressing the historian with 
his knowledge of the English language in the follow- 
ing terms : — 

" M. VAlibe Georgel fait un million de compli- 
mens a M. Hume. He makes great account of his 
vorhs, admires her ivit, and loves her person." 

If ever Hume shook his fat sides with laughter, it 
must have been at the English of M. l'Abbe Georgel. 
There is an old joke on the coast of France about an 
English lady, who, in putting up at an inn, raised a 
great confusion in the minds of the attendants by 
showing herself very particular about her two 
" sailors " (matelots) ; when all that she meant to 
impress was her nicety respecting two " mattresses " 
(matelas). The Italians have similar jokes about 
Englishmen declining to have any more at dinner, 
because they have eaten " ships " (the term for which, 
bastimento, they mistake for abastanza, enough) ; 
upon which another declines too, on the ground that 
he had eaten the "anchor" (pronouncing ancora 
instead of ancora, also). I remember an English 



TABLE-TALK. 83 

lady in Italy, who became accomplished in the lan- 
guage ; but at the outset of her studies, it was said 
of her that she one day begged a coachman not to 
drive so fast, by the title of " spoon :" — " Spoon, 
spoon, pray not so fast ;" using the word cucchiaio 
instead of cocchiere. 

The effect of this kind of mistake being in pro- 
portion to the gravity of the intention, I know of 
none better than that of an honest German (the late 
Mr. Stumpff, the harp-maker), who being disgusted 
at some trait of worldliness which he heard related, 
and wishing to say that rather than be guilty of such 
meanness he would quit society for a hermitage, and 
live upon acorns, exclaimed with great animation, 
" Oh- — I shall go into de vilderness, and live upon 
unicorns" 



HUME AND THE THREE LITTLE KINGS. 

When Hume was in Paris, receiving the homage 
of the philosophers for his scepticism, and of the 
courtiers for his advocacy of Charles the First, three 
little boys were brought before him to make him 
speeches. They complimented him after the fashion 
of grown persons, said how impatiently they had 



84 TABLE - TALK. 

expected his arrival, and expressed their admiration 
of his beautiful history. Alas ! a history too much 
like that of the Stuarts was in preparation for them. 
These children were afterwards the unfortunate Louis 
the Sixteenth, and his brother Louis the Eighteenth, 
and Charles the Tenth. 

Heaven from all creatures hides the Book of Fate, 
All but the page prescribed — their present state. 

If the poor little boys could have read in that tre- 
mendous volume, their compliments might have been 
turned in something of this fashion : — 

Little Charles the Tenth. — Accept the compli- 
ments, Mr. Jacobite, of a Prince whom you will help 
to send into exile. 

Little Louis the Eighteenth.— And of one whom 
you will help to bring from it, only to let him die 
of fat. 

Little Louis the Sixteenth.— -And of another, 
whose head your beautiful history will help to cut off. 

A CHARMING CREATURE. 

Shakspeare, in the compass of a line, has de- 
scribed a thoroughly charming girl : — 

Pretty, and witty ; wild, and yet, too, gentle. 



TABLE-TALK. 85 

BACON. 

If I were asked to describe Bacon as briefly as I 
could, I should say that he was the liberator of the 
hands of knowledge. 

SUICIDES OF BUTLEKS. 

Tragedy will break in upon one's dinner-table in 
spite of us. Mr. Wakley tells us that suicide is rife 
among butlers ! The news is startling to people at 
dinner. How many faces must have been turned on 
butlers, the day on which the coroner made the re- 
mark ; and how uncomfortable some of them must 
have felt ! The teetotallers will not overlook it ; for 
the cause appears obvious enough. The butler is 
always sipping. He is also the most sedentary of 
domestics, the house-keeper excepted ; and wine- 
merchants accuse him of having a bad conscience. 
So he grows burly and uneasy ; thinks he shall never 
retire into an inn or a public office ; loses bits of his 
property in speculation ; and when the antibilious 
pill fails him, there is an inquest. 

The poor butler should take to his legs, instead 
of his arm-chair. He should make himself easier in 



Ob TABLE-TALK. 

his mind, considering his temptations ; and cultivate 
an interest in everything out of doors, except shares 
in railroads. 



DUELS. 

The only conjecture to he made as to the possible 
utility of duels (on the assumption that the retention 
of any prevailing custom must have some foundation 
in reason) seems to be, that they serve to counteract 
the effeminate tendencies of sedentary states of 
society, and admonish us of the healthiness and 
necessity of courage. 

.For] as to suffering insolence and outrage, the 
most polished nations of antiquity had no duels, and 
yet never appear to have felt the want of them. 

But the Greeks and Eomans, by their wrestling- 
grounds, and military training, and the very naked- 
ness and beauty of their sculpture, maintained a 
sense of the desirableness of bodily vigour. 

The diffusion of knowledge, however, seems to be 
conspiring with the increased activity and practical 
good sense of the age to discountenance duelling, 
and render it ridiculous ; and as the occasions of it 
are in general really so, while the consequences are 



TABLE-TALK. 87 

tragical to the persons concerned, it is to be hoped 
that every brave and considerate man will do what he 
can to assist in proving it superfluous. 

Did anybody ever write a serious panegyric on a 
duel? It has received hundreds of banters, and 
(consequences apart) has a natural tendency to the 
burlesque. Nay, even those have given rise to it in 
some pensive minds. 

About thirty years ago, there was a famous duel 
about a couple of dogs between a Colonel Mont- 
gomery and a Captain Macnamara, in which the 
former was killed. The colonel or the captain would 
not "call his dog off," and the captain or colonel 
would not hinder his dog from going on ; and so 

Straight they call'd for swords and pistols, 

and made a few women and children miserable. 

This catastrophe occasioned a printed elegiac 
poem, the author of which, who was quite serious, 
concluded it with a burst of regret in the following 
extraordinary triplet : — 

If two fine dogs had quarrelled not ! — Oh ! if 
Not fell Montgomery through false honour's tiff, 
Nor Chalk-Farm witnessed of two heroes' miff! 



88 TABLE-TALK. 

LISTON. 

Talking of paralysis reminds one of the death of 
Liston. Poor fellow ! he had long outlived the 
active portion of his faculties, and used to stand at 
his window by Hyde Park Corner, sadly gazing at the 
tide of human existence which was going by, and 
which he had once helped to enliven. 

Liston's " face was his fortune." He was an 
actor, though truly comic and original, yet of no 
great variety; and often got credit given him for 
more humour than he intended, by reason of that 
irresistible compound of plainness and pretension, of 
chubbiness and challenge, of born, baggy, desponding 
heaviness, and the most ineffable airs and graces, 
which seemed at once to sport with and be superior 
to the permission which it gave itself to be laughed 
at. When Liston expressed a peremptory opinion, 
it was the most incredible thing in the world, it was 
so refuted by some accompanying glance, gesture, or 
posture of incompetency. When he smiled, his face 
simmered all over with a fondness of self-compla- 
cency amounting to dotage. Never had there been 
the owning of such a soft impeachment. 

Liston was aware of his plainness, and allowed 



TABLE-TALK. 89 

himself to turn it to account; but not, I suspect, 
without a supposed understanding between him and 
the audience as to the superiority of his intellectual 
pretensions ; for, like many comedians, he was a 
grave man underneath his mirth, thought himself 
qualified to be a tragedian, and did, in fact, now and 
then act in tragedy for his benefit, with a lamentable 
sort of respectability that disappointed the laughers. 
I have seen him act in this way in " Octavian," in the 
Mountaineers. 



STEEPLE-CHASING. 

Steeple-chasing is to proper bold riding what fool- 
hardiness is to courage. It proves nothing except 
that the chaser is in want of a sensation, and that he 
has brains not so much worth taking care of as those 
of other men. 

A. But is it not better than stag-hunting ? 

B. For the stag, certainly. 

A. There can be no such piteous sight at a 
steeple-chase as may be seen at other kinds of 
hunting. 

B. How can you be sure of that? I am afraid 
you are severer upon the chasers than I am. 



90 TABLE- TALK. 

A. Suppose, as the poet says — 

A stag comes weeping to a pool. 

B. Good ; but suppose 

A wife comes weeping to a fool. 

Suppose Numskull brought home on a shutter. 
Danger for danger's sake is senseless. Besides, the 
horse is worth something. One has no right to crash 
and mash it in a pit on the other side of a wall, even 
with the chance of being retributively kicked to death 
in its company. Did you ever hear this patient and 
noble creature, the horse, scream for anguish ? It is 
one of the ghastliest and most terrific of sounds ; one 
of the most tremendous even on a field of battle ; 
and depend upon it, you will catch no old soldier 
risking the chance of hearing it. If you do, he will 
be no Uncle Toby, nor Major Bath, nor the " Iron 
Duke" himself; but some brazen-faced simpleton, 
with no more brains in his head than his helmet. 

TURKEYS. 

It is amusing to see the turkey strutting and 
gobbling about the homestead. He looks like a 
burlesque on the peacock. Good old Admiral S. ! 



TABLE -TALK, 91 

How sorry he was to hear the simile; and what 
good things he had to say on the worth of turkeys in 
general, and of a foreign species of the race in 
particular. But is it not true ? Look at the animal's 
attempt to get up a sensation with his " tail," or 
what is called such. Look at the short-coming size 
of it, the uncouth heaviness of his body, the sombre 
tawdriness of his colours, and, above all, that ineffable 
drawing back of the head and throat into an intensity 
of the arrogant and self-satisfied ! He looks like a 
corpulent fop in a paroxysm of conceit. John Keeve 
was not greater in the character of Marmaduke Magog 
the beadle, when he stamped the ground in a rapture 
of pomp and vanity. Bubb Doddington might have 
looked so, when he first put on his peer's robes, and 
practised dignity before a looking-glass. The name 
of Bubb is very turkey-like. The bird's familiar 
name in Scotland, admirably expressive of its appear- 
ance, is Bubbly Jock. Goethe says that Nature has 
a lurking sense of comedy in her, and sometimes 
intends to be jocose ; and it is not difficult to imagine 
it when one considers that she includes art, and comedy 
itself, and is the inventress of turkeys. 

The turkey is a native of America, and Franklin 
recommended it for the national symbol ! 



92 TABLE-TALK. 

BAGPIPES. 

An air played on the bagpipes, with that detest- 
able, monotonous drone of theirs for the bass, is like 
a tune tied to a post. 

CAESAR AND BONAPARTE. 

To-morrow (Sunday, the 15th of the month) is 
the famous Ides of March, the day of the death of 
Caesar. During a conversation which Napoleon had 
with the German poet Wieland, he expressed his 
surprise at the " great blunder " of which Caesar was 
guilty ; and on the poet intimating by his look a desire 
to know what the blunder was, his Majesty said, it 
was trusting people with his life whose designs 
against it he was aware of. Wieland thought within 
himself, as he contemplated the imperial countenance, 
" That is a mistake that will never be committed by 
you." But see how dangerous it is for a living man 
to pronounce judgment on a dead one. If Napoleon 
would never have committed the mistake of Caesar, 
the accomplished Roman would not have fallen, as 
the other did, for want of knowing the character 
of the nations with whom he fought, and the chances 



TABLE-TALK. 98 

of a climate. Now it is better to perish in conse- 
quence of having a generous faith than a self-satisfied 
ignorance. 

PSEUDO-CHRISTIANITY. 

Some religious persons the other day, with a 
view to the promotion of " Christian union," had a 
meeting in Birmingham, at which they are said to 
have come to these two resolutions : — First, that it is 
" everybody's right and duty to exercise private judg- 
ment in the interpretation of the Scriptures;" and 
second, that " nobody is to belong to their society 
who does not hold the doctrine of the divine institu- 
tion of the Christian ministry, and the authority and 
perpetuity of Baptism and the Lord's Supper." 

This is the way Christianity has been spoilt ever 
since dogma interfered with it ; — ever since some- 
thing was put upon it that had nothing to do with it, 
in order that people might dictate to their neighbours 
instead of loving them, and indulge their pragmatical 
egotism at the very moment when they pretend to 
leave judgment free and to promote universal brother- 
hood. It is just as if some devil had said, " Chris- 
tianity shall not succeed — people shall not be of one 



94 TABLE - TALK. 

accord, and find out what's best for 'em ; — I'll invent 
dogma ; I'll invent faith versus reason ; I'll invent 
the Emperor Constantine ; I'll invent councils, popes, 
polemics, Calvins and Bonners, inquisitions, auto-da- 
fes, massacres ; and should Christianity survive and 
outgrow these, I'll invent frights about them, and 
whispers in their favour, and little private popes of 
all sorts, all infallible, all fighting with one another, 
all armed with their sine qua nons, for the purpose 
of beating down the olive-branch, and preventing 
their pretended object from superseding my real 
one." 

I do not believe, mind, that any such thing was 
said, or that this chaos of contradiction has been 
aught else but a fermentation of good and ill, out of 
which good is to come triumphant, perhaps the 
better for the trial ; for evil itself is but a form of the 
desire of good, sometimes a necessity for its attain- 
ment. But the seeming needlessness of so much 
evil, or for so long a period, is provoking to one's 
uncertainty ; and the sight of such a heap of folly is 
a trial of the patience. Our patience we must not 
lose, for then we shall fall into the error we depre- 
cate ; but let us keep reason and honest ridicule for 
ever on the watch. 



TABLE-TALK. 95 

A. But they say that ridicule is unfair. 

B. Yes ; and make use of it whenever they can. 
In like manner they deprecate reason, and then 
reason in favour of the deprecation. 

DYED HAIR. 

There is a sly rogue of a fellow advertising in the 
Dublin papers, who is very eloquent and dehortatory 
on the subject of grey hair. He says that people, 
when they begin to have it, decline " in respect and 
esteem" as "companionable beings," particularly 
with the fair sex ; nay, in their own eyes ; and there- 
fore he advises them to lose no time in availing 
themselves of an immense discovery which he has 
made, in the shape of a certain " colouring material," 
which turns the hair instantly to a " luxuriant dark." 
He tells them, that it is as easy in the operation as 
combing, preserves and invigorates as well as beauti- 
fies, will not stain the most delicate linen, is useless 
for any other purpose, and in fine will not cost them 
a farthing. All they have to pay is "two pounds" 
for the secret. He does not quit his theme without 
repeating his caution as to the dreadful consequences 
that will ensue from neglecting his advice, — that 



96 TABLE-TALK. 

" decided change," as he calls it, " which a grey or a 
bald head is sure to produce in public, private, and 
self-esteem." 

Every gentleman, not quite perfect in the colour 
of his hair, must start at this advertisement, " like a 
guilty thing surprised." He must think of all the 
friends, particularly female ones, in whose eyes he 
might or ought to have noticed a manifest decrease of 
his acceptability; must begin to reflect how painful 
it is to lose caste as a " companionable being ;" and 
what steps he ought to take, in order to recover his 
threatened standing in public and private estimation. 
" Good heaven ! " he will exclaim, looking in the 
glass, "and is it come to this? I see it; I feel it. 
Yes, there is a ' decided change ; '—virtue is gone out 
of me ; Miss Dickenson looks odd ; Lady Charlotte is 
dignified ; nobody will hold me in any further re- 
gard ; — perhaps I shall lose my office, my estate, my 
universe ; — I'm a lost, middle- tinted man." 

So saying, he disburses his two pounds in a 
frenzy ; realizes the wonderful dark hair immediately, 
and in the course of two days, what is the con- 
sequence ? I remember an elderly gentleman whose 
sister persuaded him to adopt one of these two-pound 
secrets that cost nothing. All he had to do was to 



TABLE - TALK. 97 

make use of a comb dipped in the preparation, and 
the fine dark colour undoubtedly resulted. In the 
course of a few hours it changed to a beautiful blue ; 
and he had the greatest difficulty, for days after, to 
get rid of it. 



EATING. 

Talk of indulgence in eating as you may, and 
avoid excess of it as we must, it is not a little won- 
derful to consider what respect nature entertains for 
the process, and how doubly strange and monstrous 
the consideration renders the wants of the half- 
starved. It throws us back upon thoughts more 
amazing still. We observe that the vital principle in 
the universe, instead of, or perhaps in addition to, 
its embodying itself in the shapes of created multi- 
tudes throughout the apparently uninhabited portions 
of space, tends to concentrate its phenomena into 
distinct dwelling-places, or planets, in which they are 
so crowded together (though even then with large 
seeming intervals) that they are compelled to keep 
down the populations of one another by mutual 
devourment. Fortunately (so to speak, — without 
meaning at all to assume that fortune settles the 

7 



98 TABLE-TALK. 

matter), this cruel-looking tendency is accompanied 
by nature's usual beneficent tendency to produce a 
greater amount of pleasure than pain ; for the dura- 
tion of the act of dying, or of being killed, is in no 
instance comparable with that of the state of being 
alive ; and life, upon the whole, is far more pleasur- 
able than painful (otherwise we should not feel pain 
so impatiently when it comes). The swallow snaps 
up the fly ; the fly has had its healthy pleasures ; 
and one dish entertains at a time many human 
feasters. Now think of the enormous multitude of 
those dishes — of the endless varieties of food which 
nature seems to have taken a delight in providing, 
and of the no less diversity of tastes and relishes 
with which she has recommended them to our 
palates. Take the list of eatables for mankind alone 
(if any cook could make one out), and think of its 
endless variety of fish, flesh, and fowl, of fruits, 
and vegetables, and minerals ; how many domestic 
animals it includes ; how many wild ones ; how 
many creatures out of the sea ; how many trees and 
shrubs ; how many plants and herbs ; how many 
lands, oceans, airs, climates, countries, besides the 
combinations producible out of all these results by 
the art of cookery (for art is also nature's doing) ; 



TABLE-TALK. 99 

modifications of roast and boiled and broiled, of 
pastries, jellies, creams, confections, essences, pre- 
serves. One would fancy that she intended us to do 
nothing but eat ; and, indeed, a late philosopher said, 
that her great law was, " Eat, or be eaten." The 
philosopher obeyed it pretty stoutly himself (it was 
Darwin), and he inculcated it (one would think with 
no great necessity) on his patients ; some of whose 
biliary vessels must have contributed to pay him well 
for the advice. 

For here is the puzzle. A man stands equally 
astonished at the multitude of his temptations to 
eat, at the penalty of the indulgence, and at the 
starvations of the poor. I am not going to enter into 
the question, or to endeavour to show how it may be 
reconciled with the beneficence of nature in a large 
and final point of view, the only point in which her 
great operations can be regarded. What I meant to 
show was her respect for this eating law of hers, and 
the astonishing spirit of profusion in which she has 
poured forth materials for its exercise. Why we are 
not all individually rich or healthy enough to do 
it justice is another question, which cannot, indeed, 
but suggest itself during the consideration. Mr. 
Malthus (as if that mended the matter) said there 

L.OFC. 



100 , TABLE-TALK. 

was not room enough to squeeze in at the table 
between himself and his bishop ! Let us comfort 
ourselves (till the question be settled) by reflecting 
that the mortal portion of Mr. Malthus, and of the 
bishop too, have gone to nourish the earth which is 
to support the coming generations. " Fat be the 
gander" (as the poet says) "that feeds on their 
grave." 

If you are ever at a loss to support a flagging 
conversation, introduce the subject of eating. Sir 
Eobert Walpole's secret for unfailing and harmonious 
table-talk was gallantry ; but this will not always do, 
especially as handled by the jovial minister. Even 
scandal will not be welcome to everybody. But who 
doesn't eat ? And who cannot speak of eating ? 
The subject brightens the eyes, and awakens the 
tender recollections, of everybody at table, — from the 
little boy with his beatific vision of dumpling, up to 
the most venerable person present, who mumbles his 
grouse. " He that will not mind his dinner," said 
Johnson, " will mind nothing" (he put it stronger; 
but honest words become vulgarized; and the re- 
spectable term " stomach " won't fit). Ask a lady if 
she is attached to the worthiest gentleman in the 
room, and she will reasonably think you insult her ; 



TABLE-TALK. 101 

but ask if she is "fond of veal" and she either 
enthusiastically assents, or expresses a sweet and 
timid doubt on the subject — an apologetical inability 
to accord with those who are. She "can't say she 
is." "Love" was formerly the phrase; perhaps is 
still. 

" Do you love pig ? " 

" No, I can't say I do ; but I dote upon eels." 

Questioner (looking enchanted). "Keally! "Well, 
so do I." 

Dishes are bonds, not only of present, but of 
absent unanimity. I remember an uxorious old 
gentleman, who had a pretty wife that he was recom- 
mending one day to the good graces of a lady at the 
head of a table. His wife was not present ; but he 
had been expatiating on her merits, and saying how 
Mrs. Scrivelsby did this thing and did that, and 
what a charming, elegant woman she was, when the 
conversation became diverted to other topics, and the 
lady's accomplishments lost sight of. The gentleman's 
hostess happening to speak of some fish at table, he 
asked if she "loved the roe; " and upon her owning 
that " soft impeachment," and being helped to some, 
he exclaimed, in the fondest tones, with a face full 
of final bliss, and radiant with the thoughts of the 



102 TABLE-TALK. 

two sympathizing women, the absent and the 
present— 

"Do you, indeed ?— Well, now; — Mrs. Scrivelsby 
loves the roe." 

N.B. — If anybody sees " nothing " in this story, 
he is hereby informed that he has made a discovery 
unawares ; for that is precisely the value of it. 

POLAND AND KOSCIUSKO. 

The claims of Poland may be imperfect ; she was 
once badly governed ; there is no doubt of that ; but 
so are many nations who, nevertheless, very properly 
decline to be governed by others ; and, besides, she 
has had bitter teaching, and professes to have learned 
by it. Her leaders are not so confined, as they are 
supposed to be, to the aristocracy. Kosciusko 
himself was no aristocrat, hardly, indeed, a Pole 
proper. He was a small gentleman of Lithuania; 
but he loved his half-countrymen, the Poles ; and he 
thought, with Blake, that they ought not to be " fooled 
by foreigners." 

One of the most affecting of national anecdotes is 
related of this great man during the first occupation 



TABLE-TALK. 103 

of France by the Allies. He was then living there, 
but siding neither with the Allies nor with Bonaparte. 
He never did side with either. He knew both the 
parties too well. A Polish troop in the allied service 
came foraging in his neighbourhood, and they took 
liberties with his humble garden. The owner came 
out of the house, and remonstrated with them in their 
own language. 

" Who are you," said they, exasperated, " that 
are not on our side, and yet dare to speak to us in 
this manner?" 

" My name is Kosciusko." 

They fell at his feet, and worshipped him. 

ENGLAND AND THE POPE (GREGORY). 

The Pope, instead of attending to the welfare of 
the unfortunate people whom he governs, and saving 
his country from the reproach of being the worst- 
governed state in Europe, is putting up. prayers to 
Heaven for the conversion of England ! He might 
as well come to London, and try to convert Mr. 
Cobden to the corn-laws, or the railway companies to 
the old roads. 

About eighty years ago, a Scotsman went to 



104 TABLE - TALK. 

Koine for the purpose of converting the Pope. The 
Scotsman was not content with praying. He boldly 
entered St. Peter's at high mass, and addressed his 
holiness in a loud voice, by the title of a certain lady 
who lives not a hundred miles from Babylon. The 
Pope, who at that time, luckily for the Scotsman, 
happened to be a kind and sensible man (Ganganelli), 
was advised to send him to the galleys ; but he 
answered, that the galleys were but a sorry place to 
teach people " good breeding ; " so he put the honest 
fanatic into a ship, and sent him home again to 
Scotland. 

We, in England here, should be equally civil to 
the Pope, if he would do us the honour of a visit ; 
and he might take Dr. Pusey away with him if he 
pleased, together with a score or two of ladies and 
gentlemen who constitute converted England. 

It is a little too late in the day to expect English- 
men to pant after purgatory and confession ; to 
rejoice in the damnation of their fathers and 
mothers and little children ; or even to wish for the 
celibacy of their clergy. Their clergy are accused of 
being lively enough already towards the ladies. 
"What would they be if they had no wives ? 
" Gracious heavens ! " Why, in the course of six 



TABLE-TALK. 105 

months the bench of Bishops would be as bad as 
Cardinals. 



THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON'S CONCERT. 

The Duke of Wellington has been directing a 
concert of Ancient Music. It is curious to see the 
music he selected ; what a mixture it is of devotion, 
fighting, and gallantry; how he abides by the 
favourites of his youth ; and how pleasantly, and like 
a good son, he includes the compositions of his 
father, Lord Mornington. Conquerors deal in such 
tremendous (and disputable) wares, that it is not 
easy to determine the amount of their genius : — to 
distinguish it from chances and consequences, or to 
say how much of it is not owing to negative as well 
as positive qualities. The world are hardly in a 
condition to judge a man who plays at chess with 
armies ; — who blows us up ; takes us by storm and 
massacre ; and alters the face of nations. He may 
or may not be as great as we suppose ; though his 
want of civil talents is generally against him, and he 
often perishes out of imprudence. But there can be 
no doubt that a great soldier is a very striking and 
important person of some kind ; and to catch him at 



106 TABLE-TALK. 

these soft, harmonious, and filial amusements is 
interesting. The Duke's concert the other day was 
in good old taste, not omitting some of the later 
great masters. There was plenty of Handel in it ; 
some Gluck and Paesiello, Beethoven and Mozart ; 
Avison's " Sound the loud timbrel ; " a glee of 
Webbe's ; another by his Grace's father, aforesaid ; 
and the fine old French air, " Charmante Gabrielle," 
which, an arch rogue of a critic says, was sung in a 
" chaste manner " by Madame Caradori. Not that 
the chastity is to be doubted, or that the air was 
not one of recognized propriety ; but it is worth 
considering how 

Nice customs curtsey to great kings ; 

what storms of honour and glory, and royal and 
national trumpets, have been allowed to smuggle into 
good society the "charming Gabrielle," mistress 
of Henri Quatre; and how the fair singer would 
have been scared at being requested to do as much 
for the charming Jane Shore, or giddy Mrs. Eleanor 
Gwynn. 

The Duke of Wellington's was a right soldier's 
concert, a little overdone perhaps in the church-going 
quarter — a little too much on the oratorio side ; but 



TABLE-TALK. 107 

that miglit have been looked for at an " Ancient 
Concert," famous for memories of George the Third. 
The rest was given to love and fighting, — to " Gird 
on thy sword," and " Giving them Hailstones," and 
" charming Gabrielle," and the ladies' duet in 
Mozart, "Prendero quel brunettino " (I'll take that 
little brown fellow), which may have been connected 
with some pleasing reminiscences of country-quarters, 
or the jungles of Hyderabad. 

But the paternal glee, after all, was the thing; 
the filial reminiscence; the determination of the 
great " iron " Duke to stand by his little, gentle, 
accomplished father, the amateur composer; and a 
very pretty composer too. All soldiers can go to 
church and admire charming Gabrielles ; but it is 
not for every great fame thus to stand by a minor 
one, and take a pride in showing off the father on 
whose knee it sat in its infancy. 

The Duke is a good fellow, depend upon it, 
me patre judice. He may give odd answers to 
deputations, and be " curst and brief " to autograph- 
seekers, and not know how to talk in their own 
language to his warm-hearted Irish countrymen. I 
wish he did. But he sticks to his father. He will 
have due honour paid to the paternal crotchets. 



108 TABLE - TALK. 

WAR, DINNER, AND THANKSGIVING. 

It is not creditable to a f< thinking people " that 
the two things they most thank God for should be 
eating and righting. We say grace when we are 
going to cut up lamb and chicken, and when we have 
stuffed ourselves with both to an extent that an 
ourang-outang would be ashamed of; and we offer 
up our best praises to the Creator for having blown 
and sabred his "images," our fellow-creatures, to 
atoms, and drenched them in blood and dirt. This 
is odd. Strange that we should keep our most pious 
transports for the lowest of our appetites and the 
most melancholy of our necessities ! that we should 
never be wrought up into paroxysms of holy gratitude 
but for bubble and squeak, or a good- sized massacre ! 
that we should think it ridiculous to be asked to say 
grace for a concert or a flower-show, or the sight of a 
gallery of pictures, or any other of the divinest gifts 
of Heaven, yet hold it to be the most natural and 
exalted of impulses to fall on our knees for having 
kicked, beaten, torn, shattered, drowned, stifled, 
exenterated, mashed, and abolished thousands of 
our "neighbours," whom we are directed to "love 
as ourselves ! " 



TABLE-TALK. 109 

A correspondent of The Times, who had of course 
been doing his duty in this respect, and thanking 
Heaven the first thing every morning for the carnage 
in the Punjaub, wished the other day to know " what 
amount of victory was considered, by the Church or 
State, to call forth a public expression of thankfulness 
to Almighty God." He was angry that the Bishops 
had not been up and stirring at the slaughter ; that 
Sir Robert Peel was not as anxious to sing hymns 
for it, as to feed the poor ; that Lord John Eussell, 
with all his piety, was slower to call for rejoicings over 
the Sikh widows, than attention to hapless Ireland. 

The pause did Government honour. The omission 
of the ceremony, if they had had courage enough to 
pass it by altogether, would have done them more. 
Not because God is not to be reverenced in storm as 
in sunshine, but because it does not become any 
section of his creatures to translate these puzzles of 
the mystery of evil in their own favour ; and, with 
the presumptuous vanity called humility, thank him, 
like the Pharisee, for not being conquered like "those " 
Indians. Our meddling with the Punjaub at all is 
connected with some awkward questions. So is our 
whole Indian history. I believe it to have been the 
inevitable, and therefore, in a large and final point of 



110 TABLE-TALK. 

view, the justifiable and desirable consequence of that 
part of the " right of might " which constitutes the 
only final secret of the phrase, and which arises from 
superior knowledge and the healthy power of advance- 
ment. But in the' humility becoming such doubtful 
things as human conclusions, it behoves us not to 
play the fop at every step ; not to think it necessary 
to God's glory or satisfaction to give Him our 
"sweet voices," even though we do it in their most 
sneaking tones : nor to thank the good Father for 
having been chosen to be the scourgers of our weaker 
brethren. 

" Go," we might imagine him saying ; " go, and 
hold your tongues, and be modest. Don't afflict me 
during the necessity with your stupid egotism. Per- 
haps I chose you for the task, only because you had 
the less sensibility." 

FIRES AND MARTYRDOM. 

Fires are still happening every day, notwithstand- 
ing the tremendous lessons which they give to the 
incautious. People are shocked at the moment, and 
say that something must be done ; but in the course 
of four-and-twenty hours they forget the shrieking 



TABLE-TALK. Ill 

females at the windows, and the children reduced to 
ashes ; and the calamities are risked as before. It 
is really a pity that Parliament does not interfere. 
Officious legislation is bad : but if the public are 
children in this respect, and don't know how to take 
care of themselves, grown understandings ought to 
help them. Parliament can ordain matters about 
lamps and pavements ; why not about balconies for 
great houses, and corridors at the back of smaller 
ones ? Are health and convenience of more im- 
portance than being saved from the cruellest of 
deaths ? 

Meantime, what an opportunity presents itself to 
Puseyites and others for a little indisputable Chris- 
tianity — a good practical restitution of their favourite 
days of martyrdom and self-sacrifice. It is said that 
no calamitous chance of things is ever done away 
with in this country, unless some great man happens 
to be the victim. Now the Puseyites are accused of 
being Christian only in disputation, with great dislikes 
of foregoing their comforts and snug corners. Here 
is an occasion for them to prove their brotherly love 
— to show how their gold can be tried in the fire. 
Why cannot Dr. Pusey, or Mr. Newman, or Mr. Wells 
(who admires the tapers and other splendid shows of 



112 TABLE-TALK, 

Popery) be a shining light himself, of the most un- 
questionable order ? Why not take some house about 
to be pulled down in a great thoroughfare, assemble 
a crowd at night-time, set fire to the goods and 
chattels round about him like an Indian widow, step 
forth into the balcony to show us how easy it was 
for him to escape, and then, in spite of our cries, 
tears, agonies, and imploring remonstrances (the 
more, the memorabler), offer himself up, like a second 
Polycarp, on the altar of human good? Invidious 
people say, that it is no very difficult thing for a man 
to be a shining light in a good comfortable pulpit, 
between breakfast and dinner, with no greater heat 
on him than that of his self-complacency ; but the 
Eidleys and Bradfords found a different business of 
it at the stake ; and here is an opportunity for such 
as sneer at those Protestant martyrs, to show how 
they can be martyrs themselves of a nobler sort, and 
of the most undoubted utility. For who could forget 
the circumstance ? what balconies and corridors would 
not start forth to their honour and glorification all 
over the metropolis ? 

But perhaps the Bishop of London, who is jealous 
of his prerogative, might choose to avail himself of 
the opportunity. Or suppose Bishop Philpotts re- 



TABLE-TALK. 113 

quested it of him as a favour. What a truly reviving 
spectacle, in these days of Christian declension, to 
see the two bishops, at the last moment, affectionately 
contesting with one another the honour of the sacri- 
fice, and trying to thrust his brother off the devoted 
premises. 

RESPECTABILITY. 

" When the question was put to one of the wit- 
nesses on the trial of Thurtell, ' What sort of a per- 
son was Mr. Weare ? ' the answer was, ' Mr. Weare 
was respectable. ,' On being pressed by the ex- 
amining counsel as to what he meant by respecta- 
bility, the definition of the witness was, that ' he kept 
a gig!'" 

" A person," says the York Courant, on this 
incident, " was annoying a whole company in a public 
room, and one of them reproving him sharply for his 
indecorum, an apologist whispered, * Pray, do not 
offend the gentleman ; I assure you he is a respec- 
table man. He is worth two hunched a year indepen- 
dent property." 

There is no getting at the root of these matters, 
unless we come to etymology. People mean some- 

8 



114 TABLE-TALK. 

thing when they say a man is respectable — they 
mean something different from despicable or intole- 
rable. What is it they do mean ? Why, they mean 
that the gentleman is worth twice looking at — he is 
respectable, re-spectabilis ; that is to say, literally, 
one who is to be looked at again; you must not pass 
him as though he were a common man ; you must 
turn round and observe him well ; a second look is 
necessary if you have the least respect for him : if 
you have more, you look at him again and again ; 
and if he is very respectable indeed, and you have 
the soul of a footman, you look at him till he is out 
of sight, and turn away with an air as if you could 
black his shoes for him. 

But what is " respectable ? " What is the virtue 
that makes a man worth twice looking at ? We have 
intimated it in what has been said. The York Cou- 
rant has told us — lie keeps a gig. Gig is virtue. A 
buggy announces moral worth. Curriculus evehit 
ad deos. 

But you must be sure that he does keep it. He 
may come in a gig, and yet the gig not be his own ; 
in which case it behoves you to be cautious. You 
must not be taken in by appearances. He may look 
like a gentleman ; he may be decently dressed ; you 



TABLE-TALK. 115 

may have seen him perform a charitable action ; he 
may be a soldier covered with scars, a patriot, a poet, 
a great philosopher ; but for all this, beware how you 
are in too much haste to look twice at him — the gig 
may have been borrowed. 

On the other hand, appearances must not con- 
demn a man. A fellow (as you may feel inclined to 
call him) drives up to the door of an inn ; his face 
(to your thinking) is equally destitute of sense and 
goodness ; he is dressed in a slang manner, calls for 
his twentieth glass of gin, has flogged his horse till 
it is raw, and condemns, with energetic impartiality, 
the eyes of all present, his horse's, the bystanders', 
and his own. Now, before you pronounce this man 
a blackguard, or think him rather to be turned away 
from with loathing, than looked at twice out of 
respect, behave you as impartially as he : take the 
ostler aside, or the red-faced fellow whom he has 
brought in the gig with him, and ask, " Is the gig 
his own?" The man, for aught you know, may 
reply, " His own ! Lord love you, he has a mint of 
money. He could ride in his coach if he pleased. 
He has kept a gig and Moll Fist these two years." 
Thus you see, without knowing it, you might have 
loathed a respectable man. " He keeps his gig." 



116 TABLE-TALK. 

But this respectable gentleman not only keeps his 
gig — he might keep his coach. He is respectable in 
esse ; in x^osse he is as respectable as a sheriff — you 
may look twice at him ; nay, many times. Let us 
see. We have here a clue to the degrees of a man's 
respectability. To keep a gig is to be simply re- 
spectable ; you may look twice at the gig-man. A 
curricle, having two horses, and costing more, is, of 
course, more respectable. You may look at the 
possessor of a curricle at least twice and a half. A 
chariot renders him fit to be regarded over and over 
again : a whole carriage demands that you should 
many times turn your neck to look at him ; if you 
learn that he drives a coach and four, the neck may 
go backwards and forwards for three minutes ; and if 
the gentleman abounds in coaches, his own carriage 
for himself, and another for his wife, together with 
gig, buggy, and dog-cart, you are bound to stand 
watching him all the way up Pall Mall, your head 
going like a fellow's jaws over a pan-pipe, and your 
neck becoming stiff with admiration. 

The story of the " two hundred a year inde- 
pendent property" is a good appendage to that of the 
gig-keeping worthy. The possessor of this virtue was 
annoying a whole company in a public room, and one 



TABLE-TALK, 117 

of theni reproving him for his indecorum, somebody 
whispered, "Do not offend the gentleman; he is a 
respectable man, I assure you. He is worth two 
hundred a year independent property." The mean- 
ing of this is, "lama slave, and believe you to be a 
slave : think what strutting fellows ive should be if 
we possessed two hundred a year ; and let us respect 
ourselves in the person of this bully." 

If people of this description could translate the 
feelings they have towards the rich, such is the 
language their version would present to them, and it 
might teach them something which they are ignorant 
of at present. The pretence of some of them is, that 
money is a great means of good as well as evil, and 
that of course they should secure the good and avoid 
the evil. But this is not the real ground of their 
zeal ; otherwise they would be zealous in behalf of 
health, temperance, and honesty, good-humour, fair 
dealing, generosity, sincerity, public virtue, and every- 
thing else that advances the good of mankind. No ; 
it is the pure, blind love of power, and the craving of 
weakness to be filled with it. Allowance should be 
made for much of it, as it is the natural abuse in a 
country where the most obvious power is commercial ; 
and the blindest love of power, after all, (let them be 



118 TABLE-TALK, 

told this secret for the comfort of human nature,) is 
an instinct of sympathy — is founded on what others 
will think of us, and what means we shall find in our 
hands for adding to our importance. It is this value 
for one another's opinion which keeps abuses so long 
in existence; but it is in the same corner of the 
human heart, now that reform has begun, that the 
salvation of the world will be found. 



USE OF THE WORD " ANGEL," &c. IN LOVE- 
MAKING. 

Lady Suffolk, when bantering Lord Peterborough 
on his fondness for the fine terms used in love-making, 
said that all she argued for was, that as these ex- 
pressions had been in all ages the favourite words of 
fine gentlemen, who would persuade themselves and 
others that they are in love, — those who really are in 
love should discard them, the better to distinguish 
themselves from impostors. But, with submission to 
her ladyship, a real lover may take them up again, as 
they were first taken up, because with him the lan- 
guage is still natural. 



TABLE-TALK. 119 

ELOQUENCE OF OMISSION. 

A late gallant Irishman, who sometimes amused 
the House of Commons, and alarmed the Ministers, 
with his brusquerie, (Mr. Montague Mathew, I believe,) 
set an ingenious example to those who are at once 
forbidden to speak, and yet resolved to express their 
thoughts. There was a debate upon the treatment of 
Ireland, and the General having been called to order 
for taking unseasonable notice of the enormities 
attributed to Government, spoke to the following 
effect : — " Oh, very well ; I shall say nothing then 
about the murders — {Order, order!) — I shall make 
no mention of the massacres — (Hear, hear ! Order !) 
— Oh, well; I shall sink all allusion to the infamous 
half-hangings — (Order, order ! Chair /) " 

This Montague Mathew was the man, who, being 
confounded on some occasion with Mr. Mathew 
Montague (a much softer- spoken gentleman), said, 
with great felicity, that people might as well confound 
" a chestnut horse with a horse chestnut." 



120 TABLE-TALK. 

GODS OF HOMER AND LUCRETIUS. 

Sir William Temple says that lie " does not know 
why the account given by Lucretius of the Gods 
should be thought more impious than that given by 
Homer, who makes them not only subject to all the 
weakest passions, but perpetually busy in all the worst 
or meanest actions of men." — Perhaps the reason is, 
that in Homer they retain something of sympathy 
with others, however misdirected or perturbed ; 
whereas the gods of Lucretius are a set of selfish 
hon-vivants, living by themselves and caring for 
nobody. 

AN INVISIBLE RELIC. 

Bruges is the place where the Catholics professed 
to have in their keeping the famous hau de Saint 
Joseph ; that is to say, one of the ho !'s which St. 
Joseph used to utter, when in the act of cleaving 
wood as a carpenter. The reader may think this a 
Protestant invention ; but the story is true. Bayle 
mentions the ho in his Dictionary. 



TABLE-TALK. 121 

A NATURAL MISTAKE. 

A little girl seeing it written over inn doors, 
" Good stabling and an ordinary on Sundays," thought 
that the stabling was good on week-days, but only 
ordinary on the Sabbath. 

MORTAL GOOD EFFECTS OF MATRIMONY. 

A lady meeting a girl who had lately left her 
service, inquired, " Well, Mary ! where do you live 
now?" — "Please, ma'am," answered the girl, "I 
don't live now — I'm married." 

UMBRELLAS. 

From passages in the celebrated verses of Swift 
on a Shower, which appeared in 1770, and in 
Gay's poem of Trivia, or the Art of Walking the 
Streets, which was written a year or two afterwards, 
it would seem that the use of umbrellas at that time 
was confined to females, and those too of the poorer 
classes. The ladies either rode in their carriages 
through the rain, or were obliged to fly from it into 
shops. 



122 TABLE-TALK, 

Now in contiguous drops the flood conies down, 
Threatening with deluge this devoted town. 
To shops in crowds the draggled females fly, 
Pretend to cheapen goods, hut nothing buy. 
The Templar spruce, while every spout's abroach, 
Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. 
The tuck'd-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, 
While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides. 

There is no mention of an umbrella for men. 
The men got under a shed, like the Templar; — 
into a coach, or into a sedan. 

Here various kinds, by various fortunes led, 
Commence acquaintance underneath a shed ; 
Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs 
Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs. 
I Box'd in a chair, the beau impatient sits, 

While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits ; 
And ever and anon, with frightful din, 
The leather sounds : he trembles from within. 
So when Troy-chairmen bore the wooden steed, 
Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed 
(Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do, 
Instead of paying chairmen, run them through), 
Laocoon struck the outside with his spear, 
And each imprison'd hero quaked for fear. 

In Gay's poem, the men are advised, in case the 
weather threatens rain, to put on their surtouts and 
worst wigs. The footman, he says, lets down the flat 
of his hat. Even among the females, the use of the 
umbrella appears to have been confined to winter 
time. 

Good housewives all the winter's rage despise, 
Defended by the riding-hood's disguise ; 



TABLE - TALK, 123 

Or, underneath the umbrella's oily shed, 

Safe through the wet, on chinking pattens tread. 

Let Persian dames th' umbrella's ribs display, 

To guard their beauties from the sunny ray ; 

Or sweating slaves support the shady load, 

When Eastern monarchs show their state abroad : 

Britain in winter only knows its aid, 

To guard from chilly show'rs the walking maid. 

When Jonas Hanway made his appearance with 
an umbrella, the vulgar hooted him for his effemi- 
nacy. 

Umbrellas, it is observable, are always mentioned 
as being oiled. I think I remember the introduction 
of silken ones. 



BOOKSELLERS' DEVICES. 

Mr. Pickering, with no unpleasing pedantry, gives 
his edition of the Poets the epithet of " Aldine." 
Aldus was the great elegant publisher of his day, and 
Mr. Pickering is ambitious of being thought his 
follower. He adopts his device in the title-page, with 
a motto calculated to mystify the unlearned, — Aldi 
Discipulus Anglus ; to-wit, Aldus's English Disciple. 
This is good, because anything is good that has faith 
in books, or elegance of choice ; but, inasmuch 
as originality is a good addition to it, a device of 



124 table-talk, 

Mr. Pickering's own would have been better. Aldus's 
dolpbin is very well done, but it is somewhat heavy. 

Mr. Taylor, the printer, a man of liberal know- 
ledge, has a device of his own — a hand pouring oil 
into the midnight lamp ; and the late Mr. Valpy had 
another, not so good, a digamma (the Greek F), 
which looked like an improvement upon a gallows. 
It seemed as if it was intended to hang two commen- 
tators instead of one ; or the parson, with his clerk 
underneath him. 



WOMEN ON THE EIGHT SIDE. 

Dr. A. Hunter said, that women who love their 
husbands generally lie on their right side. What did 
he mean by "generally?" Women who love their 
husbands always lie on the right side, for an obvious 
reason — to wit, that they cannot lie on the wrong one. 

SHENSTONE MISTAKEN. 

It is strange that Shenstone should have thought 
his name liable to no pun. A man might have con- 
vinced him to the contrary, after the fashion in which 
Johnson proposed to help forgetfulness. " Sir," 



TABLE-TALK. 125 

said the doctor to somebody who was complaining of 
short memory, "let me give you a kick on the shin, 
and I'll be bound you'll never forget it." So a man 
might have thrown a stone at Shenstone's leg, and 
said, " There, Mr. Shin-stone :" — for, as to the i and 
the e, no punster stands upon ceremony with a vowel. 

THE MARSEILLES HYMN. 

The Marseilles Hymn, though not in the very 
highest class of art, in which pure feeling supersedes 
the necessity of all literal expression, is nevertheless 
one of those genuine compositions, warm from the 
heart of a man of genius, which are qualified to please 
the highest of the scientific, and those who know 
nothing of music but by the effect it has upon them. 
The rise upon the word Patrie (or, as the English 
translator has very well made it fall, upon the word 
Glory) is a most elevating note of preparation ; this 
no sooner rouses us to war, than we are reminded of 
the affecting necessity for it, in the threats of the 
tyrants, followed by that touching passage respecting 
the tears and cries of our kindred ; and then comes 
another exalting note — the call to arms. The beating 
of the drum succeeds. We fancy the hurried muster 



126 TABLE-TALK. 

of the patriots; their arms are lifted, their swords 
unsheathed; and then comes the march — a truly 
grand movement — which even on the pianoforte sug- 
gests the fulness of a band. In the pathetic part, 
the E flat on the word fits, and the whole strain on 
that passage, are particularly affecting. The tears 
seem to come into the eyes of the heroes, as no doubt 
they have into thousands of them, and into thousands 
of those that have heard the song. But it must be 
played well ; and not be judged of by the performance 
of a new or a feeble hand. 

I know not who the author of the translation, or 
rather imitation is, but he has done it very well. 



NON-SEQUITUR. 

There is a punning epigram by Dr. Donne which 
is false in its conclusion : — 

" I am unable," yonder beggar cries, 

" To stand or go." If he says true, he lies. 

No ; because he may lean, or be held up. 



TABLE-TALK. 127 



NON-KHYMES. 

It is curious that in so correct a writer as Pope, 
and in so complete a poem as the Rape of the Lock, 
there should be two instances of rhyme, which are 
none at all : — 

But this bold Lord, with manly strength endued, I 
She with one finger and a thumb subdued. 

The doubtful beam long nods from side to side; 
At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside. 

They are both in the fifth canto. There is another 
in the Essay on Criticism. 

Unfinished things one knows not what to call, 
Their generation's so equivoca?. 



STOTHAKD. 

The death of Stothard grieved all the lovers of 
art, though it had been long expected. They re- 
gretted to think that they could have no " more last 
words " from his genius — no more of those sweet 
and graceful creations of youth, beauty, and woman- 
hood, which never ceased to flow from his pencil, 
and which made his kindly nature the abode of a 
youthful spirit to the last. An angel dwelt in that 



128 TABLE-TALK. 

tottering house, amidst the wintery bowers of white 
locks, warming it to the last with summer fancies. 

Stothard had the soul in him of a genuine painter. 
He was a designer, a colourist, a grouper ; and, above 
all, he had expression. All that he wanted was a 
better education, for he was never quite sure of his 
drawing. The want was a great one ; but if those 
who most loudly objected to it, had had a tenth part 
of his command over the human figure, or even of 
his knowledge of it (for the purposes of expression), 
they would have had ten times the right to venture 
upon criticizing him; and having that, they would 
have spoken of him with reverence. His class was 
not of the highest order, and yet it bordered upon 
the gentler portion of it, and partook of that portion ; 
for since the days of the great Italian painters, no 
man felt or expressed the graces of innocence and 
womanhood as he did. And his colouring (which 
was little known) had the true relish, such as it was. 
He loved it, and did not colour for effect only. He 
had a bit of Rubens in him, and a bit of Raphael — 
and both of them genuine ; not because he purposely 
imitated them, but because the seeds of gorgeousness 
and of grace were in his own mind. The glowing' 
and sweet painter was made out of the loving and 



TABLE-TALK 129 

good-natured man. This is the only process. The 
artist, let him he of what sort he may, is only the 
man reflected on canvas. The good qualities and 
defects of his nature are there ; and there they will 
be, let him deny or disguise them as he can. In 
youth, Stothard was probably too full of enjoyment, 
and had too little energy, to study properly. In the 
greater masters, enjoyment and energy, sensibility 
and strength of purpose, went together. Inferiority 
was the consequence; but inferiority only to them. 
The genius was indestructible. 

Stothard, for many years, was lost sight of by the 
public, owing to the more conventional elegances of 
some clever, but inferior men, and the dulness of 
public taste ; but it was curious to see how he was 
welcomed back as the taste grew better, and people 
began to see with the eyes of his early patrons. The 
variety, as well as grace, of his productions soon 
put him at the head of designers for books, and there 
he remained. "What he did for the poems of Mr. 
Kogers is well known, and his picture of the Canter- 
bury Pilgrims still better, though it was not one of 
his best. Many of his early designs for Robinson- 
Crusoe and other works, especially those in the old 
Novelist's Magazine, far surpass it ; and so do others 

9 



130 TABLE-TALK. 

in Bell's British Poets, There is a female figure 
bending towards an angel, in one of the volumes of 
Chaucer in that edition, which Eaphael himself 
might have put in his portfolio ; and the same may 
be said of larger designs for editions of Milton and 
Shakspeare. See, in particular, those from Comas, 
and for the Two Gentlemen of Verona, where there is 
a girl in boy's clothes. Nothing can be more true or 
exquisite than the little doubtful gesture of fear and 
modesty in the latter figure, blushing at the chance 
of detection. Stothard excelled in catching these 
fugitive expressions of feeling — one of the rarest of 
all beauties. But he has left hundreds, perhaps 
thousands, of designs — rich treasures for the collector 
and the student. He is one of the few English 
artists esteemed on the Continent, where his produc- 
tions are bought up like those of his friend Flaxman, 
who may be reckoned among his imitators ; for Stot- 
hard's genius was richer than his, and included it. 

THE COUNTENANCE AFTER DEATH. 

A corpse seems as if it suddenly knew everything, 
and was profoundly at peace in consequence, 



TABLE-TALK. 131 

HUME. 

Hume, the most unphilosophic (in some respects) 
of all philosophic historians, and a bigoted enemy of 
bigotry (that is to say, unable to give candid accounts 
of those whom he differed with on certain points), 
was a good-natured, easy man in personal inter- 
course, dispassionate, not ungenerous, and could do 
people kind and considerate services. Out of the 
pale of sentiment, and of what may be called the 
providential and possible, he was an unanswerable, 
or at least an unanswered dialectician ; but there was 
a whole world in that region into which he had no 
insight ; and for want of it he was not qualified to 
pronounce finally on matters of faith and religion. 

GIBBON. 

Gibbon was a sceptic, in some respects, of a 
similar kind with Hume, and more immersed in the 
senses. I say " more," because both these anti- 
spiritual philosophers were fat, double-chinned men. 
Perhaps Gibbon's life was altogether a little too 
selfish, and lapped up in cotton. He lumbered from 
his bed to his board ? and back again, with his books 



132 TABLE-TALK. 

in the intervals, or rather divided his time between 
the three, in a sort of swinishness of scholarship. 
Martyrdom and he were at a pretty distance ! He 
was not a man to die of public spirit, or to compre- 
hend very well those who did. But his scepticism 
tended to promote toleration. He was an admirable 
Latin scholar, a punctilious historian, an interesting 
writer in spite of a bad style ; and his faults, of every 
kind, appear to have been owing to temperament and 
disease, and to his having been an indulged infant, 
and heir to an easy fortune. Let us be thankful we 
got so much out of him, and that so diseased a body 
got so much out of life. A writer's infirmities are 
sometimes a reader's gain. If Gibbon had not 
disliked so much to go out of doors, we might not 
have had the Decline and Fall. 



ANGELS AND FLOWEBS. 

It might be fancied that the younger portion of 
angels — the childhood of heaven — had had a part 
assigned them in the creation of the world, and that 
they made the flowers. 

Linnseus, however, would have differed on this 
point 



TABLE-TALK. 133 

AN ENVIABLE DISTRESS. 

Mr. Kogers, according to the newspapers, has 
been robbed of plate by his footman, to the amount 
of two thousand pounds. What a beautiful calamity 
for a poet ! to be able to lose two thousand pounds ! 



SIR THOMAS DYOT. 

The street lately called Dyot Street, in St. Giles', 
is now christened (in defiance, we believe, of a legal 
proviso to the contrary) George Street. It is under- 
stood that Sir Thomas Dyot, an admirable good 
fellow in the reign of the Stuarts, left his property 
in this street, for the use and resort of the houseless 
poor who " had not where to lay their heads," upon 
condition of its retaining his name; and how the 
parish authorities came to have a right to alter the 
name, his admirers would like to knoiv. 

It is a singular instance of the effect of circum- 
stances in human affairs, that a name so excellent, 
and worthy to be had in remembrance, should 
become infamous in connexion with this very street ; 
and perhaps the authorities might undertake to vin- 
dicate themselves on that score, and ask whether Sir 



134 TABLE-TALK. 

Tkonias could have calculated upon such a vicissi- 
tude ? But I say he could, and very likely did ; for 
he knew of what sort of people the houseless poor 
were likely to be composed; and he was prepared, 
like a thorough-going friend, to take all chances with 
them, and trust to more reflecting times to do justice 
both to him and to them. 

Or if he did not think of all this, his instinct 
did ; or, at all events, it did not care for anything 
but playing the kind and manly part, and letting a 
wise Providence do the rest. Sir Thomas was a 
right hearty good fellow, whoever he was ; for nothing- 
else, I believe, is known of him ; — a little wild, per- 
haps, in his youth ; otherwise he might not have 
become acquainted with the wants of such people ; 
but ever, be sure, honest to the backbone, and a 
right gentleman, — fit companion for the Dorsets and 
Cowleys in their old age, not for the Charles the 
Seconds. Here's a libation to him in this dip of 
ink, — in default of a bumper of Burgundy. 

ANCIENT AND MODERN EXAMPLE. 

One has little sympathy after all with the virtues 
or failings of illustrious Greeks and Romans. One 



TABLE-TALK. 135 

fancies that it was their business to be heroical, and 
to furnish examples for school -themes, — owing, 
perhaps, to the formality and tiresomeness of those 
themes. We leave then the practice and glory of 
their virtues as things ancient and foreign to us, like 
their garments, or fit only to be immortalized in 
stone, — petrifactions of ambitious ethics ; — not flesh 
and blood, or next-door neighbours ; — stars for the 
sky, not things of household warmth and comfort ; — 
not feasible virtues ; — or, if feasible, rendered alien 
somehow by distance and strangeness, and perhaps 
accompanied by vices which we are hardly sorry to 
meet with, and which our envy (and something better) 
converts into reconcilements of their virtue; — as 
when we hear, for example, that old Cato drank, or 
that Phocion said an arrogant thing on the " hustings," 
or that Numa (as a Frenchman would say,) visited a 
pretty girl "of afternoons," — Ma'amselle Egerie, — 
who, he pretended, was a goddess and an oracle, and 
gave him thoughts on legislation. So, of the professed 
men of pleasure in the ancient world, — or indeed of 
professed men of pleasure at any time (for their 
science makes them remote and peculiar, a sort of 
body apart, excessively Free Masons), one doesn't 
think oneself bound to resemble them. Their example 



136 TABLE-TALK. 

is not pernicious, much less of any use for the attain- 
ment of actual pleasure. Who thinks of imitating 
the vices of Caesar or Alexander, out of an ambition 
of universality ? (what a preposterous fop would he 
be !) or stopping to drink and carouse when he ought 
to be moving onward, because Hannibal did it ? or 
of being a rake because Alcibiades had a reputation 
of that sort (unless, perhaps, it be some one of our 
lively ultra-classical neighbours, whose father has 
indiscreetly christened him Alcibiacle, and who 
studies Greek beauty in a ballet) ? We do not think 
of imitating men in Greek helmets or the Roman 
toga. Their example is only for school-exercises, or 
to be brought forward in the speech of some virgin 
orator. We must have heroism in a hat and boots, 
and good-fellowship at a modern table. It is our 
everyday names, Smith, Jones, and Robinson, that 
must be instanced for an example which we can 
thoroughly feel. Has Thomson done a handsome 
action ? Everybody cries, " What a good fellow is 
Thomson." Is a living man of wit effeminate and 
a luxurious liver ? The example becomes perilous. 
It' is no remote infection, no "Plague of Athens." 
The disease is next door, — a pestilence that loungeth 
at noon, — a dandy cholera. 



TABLE-TALK. 137 

Nobody cares much for Psetus and Arria, and the 
fine example they set. Those Komans seem bound 
to have set them, for the benefit of the " Selectae e 
Profanis " and the publications of Mr. Valpy. Lucretia 
sits "alone in her glory," a kind of suicide-statue, — 
too hard of example to be followed. We cannot think, 
somehow, that she felt much, except as a personage 
who should one day be in the classical dictionaries. 
And Portia's appears an odd and unfeeling taste; 
w T ho swallowed "burning coals," instead of having 
a proper womanly faint, and taking a glass of 
water. 

But tell us of "Mrs. Corbet" (celebrated by 
Pope), who heroically endured the cancer that killed 
her, and we understand the thing. Recount us a 
common surgical case of a man who has his leg cut 
off without wincing ; and as we are no farther off 
than St. Bartholomew's hospital, it comes home to 
us. Tell us what a good fellow Thomson the poet 
was, or how Quin took him out of a spunging-house 
with a hundred pounds, or how Johnson " loved to 
dine," or Cowper solaced his grief with flowers and 
verses, and we all comprehend the matter perfectly, 
and are incited to do likewise. 



138 TABLE-TALK 

MILTON AND HIS PORTRAITS. 

There can be little doubt, that Milton, however 
estimable and noble at heart, was far from being 
perfect in his notions of household government. He 
exacted too much submission to be loved as he 
wished. His wife (which was a singular proceeding 
in the bride of a young poet) absented herself from 
him in less than a month after their marriage ; 
that is to say, during the very honeymoon ; and she 
stayed away the whole summer with her relations. 
He made his daughters read to him in languages 
which they did not understand ; and in one part of 
his works he piques himself, like Johnson, on being 
a good hater. Now, "good haters," as they call 
themselves, are sometimes very good men, and hate 
out of zeal for something they love ; neither would 
we undervalue the services which , such haters may 
have done mankind. They may have been necessary ; 
though a true Christian philosophy proposes to super- 
sede them, and certainly does not recommend them. 
But as all men have their faults, so these men are 
not apt to have the faults that are least disagreeable, 
even to one another ; for it is observable that good 
haters are far from loving their brethren, the good 



TABLE-TALK. 139 

haters on the other side ; and their tempers are apt 
to be infirm and overbearing. In the most authentic 
portraits of Milton, venerate them as one must, it is 
difficult not to discern a certain uneasy austerity — a 
peevishness — a blight of something not sound in 
opinion and feeling. 

WILLIAM HAY. 

Hay, the author of an Essay on Deformity, was 
a member of Parliament, and an adherent, but not 
a servile one, to the government of Sir Robert 
Walpole. He was author of several publications on 
moral and political subjects, interesting in their day, 
and not unworthy of being looked at by posterity. He 
was a very amiable and benevolent man, of which his 
essays afford abundant evidence ; and his name is to 
be added to the list of those delightful individuals, 
not so rare as might be imagined, who surmount the 
disadvantages of personal exterior on the wings of 
beauty of spirit. It is observable, however, of these 
men, that they have generally fine eyes. 



140 TABLE-TALK. 



BISHOP CORBET. 



It is related of this facetious prelate, who flou- 
rished in the time of Charles the First, and whose 
poems have survived in the collections, that, having 
heen tumbled into the mud with a fat friend of his by 
the fall of a coach, he said that " Stubbins was up to 
the elbows in mud, and he was up to the elbows in 
Stubbins." During a confirmation, he said to the 
country people who were pressing too closely upon 
the ceremony, " Bear off there, or I'll confirm you 
with my staff." And another time, on a like 
occasion, having to lay his hand on the head of a 
very bald man, he turned to his chaplain and said, 
" Some dust, Lushington," to keep his hand from 
slipping. 

Corbet's constitutional vivacity was so strong, as 
hardly to have been compatible with episcopal 
decorum. But times and manners must be taken 
into consideration ; and, though a bishop of this turn 
of mind would have been forced, had he lived now, to 
be more considerate in regard to times and places, 
there is no reason to doubt that he took himself for 
as good a churchman as he was an honest man. And 
liberties are sometimes taken by such men with 



TABLE-TALK. 141 

serious objects of regard, not so much out of a light 
consideration, as from the confidence of love. Had 
Corbet lived in later times, he would, perhaps, have 
furnished as high an example of elegant episcopacy 
as any of the Bundles or Shipley s. As it was, 
he was a sort of manly college-boy, who never 
grew old. 

HOADLY. 

Hoadly, the son of the bishop, and author of the 
Suspicious Husband, was a physician, and a good- 
natured, benevolent man. His play has been thought 
as profligate as those of Congreve ; but there is an 
animal spirit in it, and a native under-current of good 
feeling, very different from the sophistication of Con- 
greve's fine ladies and gentlemen. Congreve writes 
like a rake upon system ; Hoadly like a wild-hearted 
youth from school. 

VOLTAIRE. 

Perhaps Voltaire may be briefly, and not unjustly, 
characterized as the only man who ever obtained a 
place in the list of the greatest names of the earth, 



142 TABLE-TALK. 

by an aggregation of secondary abilities. He was 
the god of cleverness. To be sure, be was a very 
great wit. 



HANDEL. 

Handel was tbe Jupiter of music ; nor is the title 
the less warranted from his including in his genius 
the most affecting tenderness as well as the most 
overpowering grandeur : for the father of gods and 
men was not only a thunderer, but a love-maker. 
Handel was the son of a physician ; and, like Mozart, 
began composing for the public in his childhood. 
He was the grandest composer that is known to have 
existed, wielding, as it were, the choirs of heaven and 
earth together. Mozart said of him, that he " struck 
you, whenever he pleased, with a thunderbolt." His 
hallelujahs open the heavens. He utters the word 
" Wonderful," as if all their trumpets spoke together. 
And then, when he comes to earth, to make love 
amidst nymphs and shepherds (for the beauties of all 
religions found room in his breast), his strains drop 
milk and honey, and his love is the youthfulness of 
the Golden Age. We see his Acis and Galatea, in 
their very songs, looking one another in the face in 



TABLE-TALK. 143 

all the truth and mutual homage of the tenderest 
passion ; and poor jealous Polyphemus stands in the 
background, blackening the scene with his gigantic 
despair. Christian meekness and suffering attain 
their last degree of pathos in " He shall feed his 
flock," and " He was despised and rejected." We 
see the blush on the smitten cheek, mingling with 
the hair. 

Handel had a large, heavy person, and was 
occasionally vehement in his manners. He ate and 
drank too much (probably out of a false notion of 
supporting his excitement), and thus occasionally did 
harm to mind as well as body. But he was pious, 
generous, and independent, and, like all great 
geniuses, a most thorough lover of his art, making no 
compromises with its demands and its dignity for the 
sake of petty conveniences. There is often to be 
found a quaintness and stiffness in his style, owing to 
the fashion of the clay ; and he had not at his 
command the instrumentation of the present times, 
which no man would have turned to more over- 
whelming account; but what is sweet in his composi- 
tions is surpassed in sweetness by no other; and what 
is great/is greater than in any. 



144 TABLE - TALK. 



MONTAIGNE. 



Montaigne's father, to create in him an equable 
turn of mind, used to have him waked during his 
infancy with a flute. 

Montaigne was a philosopher of the material 
order, and as far-sighted perhaps that way as any 
man that ever lived, having that temperament, 
between jovial and melancholy, which is so favour- 
able for seeing fair play to human nature ; and his 
good-heartedness rendered him an enthusiastic friend, 
and a believer in the goodness of others, notwith- 
standing his insight into their follies and a good 
stock of his own ; for he lived in a coarse and 
licentious age, of the freedoms of which he partook. 
But for want of something more imaginative and 
spiritual in his genius, his perceptions stopped short 
of the very finest points, critical and philosophical. 
He knew little of the capabilities of the mind, out of 
the pale of its more manifest influences from the 
body ; his taste in poetry was logical, not poetical ; 
and he ventured upon openly despising romances 
("Amadis de Gaul," &c.) ; which was hardly in 
keeping with the modesty of his motto, Que scais-je ? 
("What do I know?") 



TABLE-TALK. 145 

Montaigne, who loved his father's memory, rode 
out in a cloak which had belonged to him ; and 
would say of it, that he seemed to feel "wrapped up 
in his father" (" il me semble m'envelopper de lui"). 
Some writers have sneered at this saying, and at the 
conclusions drawn from it respecting the amount of 
his filial affection ; but it does him as much honour 
as anything he ever uttered. There is as much 
depth of feeling in it as vivacity of expression. 

WALLER. 

Pope said of Waller, that he would have been a 
better poet had he entertained less admiration of 
people in power. But surely it was the excess of 
that propensity which inspired him. He was 
naturally timid and servile ; and poetry is the flower 
of a man's real nature, whatever it be, provided there 
be intellect and music enough to bring it to bear. 
Waller's very best pieces are those in praise of 
sovereign authority and of a disdainful mistress. He 
would not have sung Sacharissa so well, had she 
favoured him. 



10 



146 TABLE-TALK. 

OTWAY. 

Otway is the poet of sensual pathos : for, 
affecting as he sometimes is, he knows no way 
to the heart but through the senses. His very 
friendship, though enthusiastic, is violent, and has 
a smack of bullying. He was a man of generous 
temperament, spoilt by a profligate age. He seems 
to dress up a beauty in tears, only for the purpose of 
stimulating her wronger s. 

EAPHAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO. 

The lovers of energy in its visible aspect think 
Michael Angelo the greatest artist that ever lived. 
Ariosto (in not one of his happiest compliments) 
punning upon his name, calls him — 

Michel, piu che mortal, Angiol divino. 
Michael, the more than man, Angel divine. 

Pursuing the allusion, it may be said that there 
is much of the same difference between him and 
Kaphael, as there is between their namesakes, the 
warlike archangel Michael, in Paradise Lost, and 
Kaphael, " the affable archangel." But surely Kaphael, 



TABLE-TALK. 147 

by a little exaggeration, could have done all that 
Michael Angelo did ; whereas Michael Angelo could 
not have composed himself into the tranquil per- 
fection of Eaphael. Eaphael's Gods and Sibyls are 
as truly grand as those of Buonarroti ; while the 
latter, out of an instinct of inferiority in intellectual 
and moral grandeur, could not help eking out the 
power of his with something of a convulsive strength, 
— an ostentation of muscle and attitude. His 
Jupiter was a Mars intellectualized. Eaphael's was 
always Jupiter himself, needing nothing more, and 
including the strength of beauty in that of majesty ; 
as true moral grandeur does in nature.* 



WAX AND HONEY. 

Wax-lights, though we are accustomed to over- 
look the fact, and rank them with ordinary common- 
places, are true fairy tapers, — a white metamorphosis 
from the flowers, crowned with the most intangible of 
all visible mysteries— fire. 

Then there is honey, which a Greek poet would 

* Since making these remarks, I have seen the bust of a 
Susannah, which, if truly attributed to Michael Angelo, proves him 
to have been the master of a sweetness of expression inferior to no 
man. It is indeed the perfection of loveliness. 



148 TABLE-TALK. 

have called the sister of wax, — a thing as beautiful to 
eat as the other is to look upon ; and beautiful to 
look upon too. What two extraordinary substances 
to be made, by little winged creatures, out of roses 
and lilies ! What a singular and lovely energy in 
nature to impel those little creatures thus to fetch 
out the sweet and elegant properties of the coloured 
fragrances of the gardens, and serve them up to us 
for food and light ! — honey to eat, and waxen tapers 
to eat it by ! What more graceful repast could be 
imagined on one of the fairy tables made by Vulcan, 
which moved of their own accord, and came gliding, 
when he wanted a luncheon, to the side of Apollo !— 
the honey golden as his lyre, and the wax fair as his 
shoulders. Depend upon it, he has eaten of it many 
a time, chatting with Hebe before some Olympian 
concert ; and as he talked in an under-tone, fervid as 
the bees, the bass-strings of his lyre murmured an 
accompaniment. 

ASSOCIATIONS WITH SHAKSPEARE. 

How naturally the idea of Shakspeare can be 
made to associate itself with anything which is worth 
mention ! Take Christmas for instance ; " Shak- 



TABLE-TALK. 149 

speare and Christmas;" the two ideas fall as happily 
together as " wine and walnuts," or heart and soul. 
So you may put together " Shakspeare and May," or 
" Shakspeare and June," and twenty passages start 
into your memory about spring and violets. Or you 
may say, " Shakspeare and Love," and you are in the 
midst of a bevy of bright damsels, as sweet as rose- 
buds ; or " Shakspeare and Death," and all graves, 
and thoughts of graves, are before you ; or " Shak- 
speare and Life," and you have the whole world of 
youth, and spirit, and Hotspur, and life itself; or 
you may say even, " Shakspeare and Hate," and he 
will say all that can be said for hate, as well as 
against it, till you shall take Shylock himself into 
your Christian arms, and tears shall make you of 
one faith. 



BAD GREAT MEN. 

There have, undoubtedly, been bad great men ; 
but, inasmuch as they were bad, they were not great. 
Their greatness was not entire. There was a great 
piece of it omitted. They had heads, legs, and 
arms, but they wanted hearts; and thus were not 
whole men. 



150 TABLE-TALK. 

CICEEO. 

This great Roman special pleader — the lawyer of 
antiquity — the child of the old age of Eoman virtue, 
when words began' to be taken for things — was the 
only man ever made great by vanity. 

FLOWERS IN WINTER. 

It is a charming sight to see China roses covering 
the front of a cottage in winter- time. It looks as if 
we need have no winter, as far as flowers are con- 
cerned ; and, in fact, it is possible to have both a 
beautiful and a fragrant garden in January. There 
is a story in Boccaccio, of a magician who conjured 
up a garden in winter-time. His magic consisted in 
his having a knowledge beyond his time ; and magic 
pleasures, so to speak, await on all who choose to 
exercise knowledge after his fashion and to realize 
what the progress of information and good taste may 
suggest. 

Even a garden six feet wide is better than none. 
Now the possessor of such a garden might show his 
"magic" by making the most of it, and filling it 
with colour. 



TABLE-TALK. 151 



CHARLES LAMB. 



Lamb was a humanist, in the most universal 
sense of the term. His imagination was not great, 
and he also wanted sufficient heat and music to 
render his poetry as good as his prose; but as a 
prose writer, and within the wide circuit of humanity, 
no man ever took a more complete range than he. 
He had felt, thought, and suffered so much, that he 
literally had intolerance for nothing; and he never 
seemed to have it, but when he supposed the sympa- 
thies of men, who might have known better, to be 
imperfect. He was a wit and an observer of the first 
order, as far as the world around him was concerned, 
and society in its existing state ; for as to anything 
theoretical or transcendental, no man ever had less 
care for it, or less power. To take him out of habit 
and convention, however tolerant he was to those who 
could speculate beyond them, was to put him into an 
exhausted receiver, or to send him naked, shivering, 
and driven to shatters, through the regions of space 
and time. He was only at his ease in the old arms 
of humanity; and humanity loved and. comforted 
him like one of its wisest, though weakest children. 
His life had experienced great and peculiar sorrows ; 



152 TABLE-TALK. 

but he kept up a balance between those and his con- 
solations, by the goodness of his heart, and the ever- 
willing sociality of his humour; though, now and 
then, as if he would cram into one moment the 
spleen of years, he would throw out a startling and 
morbid subject for reflection, perhaps in no better 
shape than a pun ; for he was a great punster. It 
was a levity that relieved the gravity of his 
thoughts and kept them from falling too heavily 
earthwards. 

Lamb was under the middle size, and of fragile 
make; but with a head as fine as if it had been 
carved on purpose. He had a very weak stomach. 
Three glasses of wine would put him in as lively a 
condition as can only be wrought in some men by as 
many bottles; which subjected him to mistakes on 
the part of the inconsiderate. 

Lamb's essays, especially those collected under 
the signature of Elia, will take their place among 
the daintiest productions of English wit-melancholy, 
— an amiable melancholy being the ground-work of 
them, and serving to throw out their delicate flowers 
of wit and character with the greater nicety. Nor 
will they be liked the less for a sprinkle of old lan- 
guage, which was natural in him by reason of his 



/ 



TABLE-TALK. 153 

great love of the old English writers. Shakspeare 
himself might have read them, and Hamlet have 
quoted them. 



SPORTING. 

The second of September is terrible in the annals 
of the French Revolution, for a massacre, the per- 
petrators of which were called Septembrizers. If the 
birds had the settlement of almanacks, new and 
startling would be the list of Septembrizers and their 
fusillades, — amazing the multitude of good-humoured 
and respectable faces that would have to look in the 
glass of a compulsory self-knowledge, and recognize 
themselves for slaughterers by wholesale, — or worse, 
— distributors of broken bones and festering dislo- 
cations. 

"And what " (a reader may ask) " would be the 
good of that, if these gentlemen are not aware of 
their enormities ? Would it be doing anything but 
substituting one pain for another, and setting men's 
minds upon needless considerations of the pain 
which exists in the universe ? " 

Yes : — for these gentlemen are perhaps not quite 
so innocent and unconscious, as in the gratuitousness 



154 TABLE-TALK. 

of your philosophy you are willing to suppose them. 
Besides, should they cease to give pain, they would 
cease to feel it in its relation to themselves : and as 
to the pain existing in the universe, people in general 
are not likely to feel it too much, especially the 
healthy,* nor ought anybody to do so, in a feeble 
sense, as long as he does what he can to diminish it, 
and trusts the rest to Providence and futurity. What 
we are incited by our own thoughts, or those of 
others, to amend, it becomes us to consider to that 
end : what we cannot contribute any amendment to, 
we must think as well of as we can contrive. Sports- 
men for the most part are not a very thoughtful 
generation. No harm would be done them by putting 
a little more consideration into their heads. On the 
other hand, all sportsmen are not so comfortable in 
their reflections as their gaiety gives out ; and the 
moment a man finds a contradiction in himself 
between his amusements and his humanity, it is a 
signal that he should give them up. He will other- 
wise be hurting his nature in other respects, as well 
as in this ; he will be exasperating his ideas of his 
fellow-creatures, of the world, of Grod himself; and 
thus he will be inflicting pain on all sides, for the 
sake of tearing out of it a doubtful pleasure. 



TABLE-TALK. 155 

"But it is effeminate to think too much of pain, 
under any circumstances." 

Yes, — including that of leaving off a favourite 
pastime. 

Oh, we need not want noble pains, if we are 
desirous of them ; — pains of honourable endeavours, 
pains of generous sympathy, pains, most masculine 
pains, of self-denial. Are not these more manly, 
more anti-effeminate, than playing with life and 
suffering, like spoilt children, and cracking the legs 
of partridges ? 

Most excellent men have there been, and doubt- 
less are, among sportsmen, — truly gallant natures, 
reflecting ones too, — men of fine wit and genius, and 
kind as mother's milk in all things but this, — in all 
things but killing mothers because they are no better 
than birds, and leaving the young to starve in the 
nest, and strewing the brakes with agonies of fea- 
thered wounds. If I sometimes presume to think 
myself capable of teaching them better, it is only 
upon points of this nature, and because, for want of 
early habit and example, my prejudices have not 
been enlisted against my reflection. Most thankfully 
would I receive the wisdom they might be able to 
give me on all other points. But see what habit can 



156 table-talk 

do with the best natures, and how inferior ones may 
sometimes be put upon a superior ground of know- 
ledge from the absence of it. Gilbert Wakefield I 
take to have been a man of crabbed nature, as well 
as confined understanding, compared with Fox : yet 
in the public argument which he had with the states- 
man on the subject, Wakefield had the best of it, 
poorly as it was managed by him. The good-natured 
legislator could only retreat into vague generalities 
and smiling admissions, and hope that his corre- 
spondent would not think ill of him. And who 
does ? We love Fox always, almost when he is on 
the instant of pointing his gun ; and we are equally 
inclined to quarrel with the tone and manner of his 
disputant, even when in the act of abasing it. But 
what does this prove, except the danger of a bad 
habit to the self-reconciling instincts of a fine enjoying 
nature, and to the example which flows from it into 
so much reconcilement to others ? When a common, 
hard-minded sportsman takes up his fowling-piece, 
he is to be regarded only as a kind of wild beast on 
two legs, pursuing innocently his natural propen- 
sities, and about to seek his prey, as a ferret does, or 
a wild cat ; but the more of a man he is, the more 
bewildered and dangerous become one's thoughts 



TABLE-TALK. 157 

respecting the meeting of extremes. When Fox 
takes up the death-tube, we sophisticate for his sake, 
and are in hazard of becoming effeminate on the 
subject, purely to shut our eyes to the cruelty in it, 
and to let the pleasant gentleman have his way. 

As to the counter-arguments about Providence 
and permission of evil, they are edge tools which it is 
nothing but presumption to play with. What the mind 
may discover in those quarters of speculation, it is 
impossible to assert ; but, as far as it has looked yet, 
nothing is ascertained, except that the circle of God's 
privileges is one thing, and that of man's another. 
If we knew all about pain and evil, and their necessi- 
ties, and their consequences, we might have a right 
to inflict them, or to leave them untouched ; but not 
being possessed of this knowledge, and on the other 
hand being gifted with doubts, and sympathies, and 
consciences, after our human fashion, we must give 
our fellow-creatures the benefit of those doubts and 
consciences, and cease to assume the rights of gods, 
upon pain of becoming less than men. 



158 TABLE-TALK 



WISDOM OF THE HEAD AND OF THE HEART. 

The greatest intellects ought not to rank at the 
top of their species, any more than the means rank 
above the end. The instinctive wisdom of the heart 
can realize, while the all-mooting subtlety of the head 
is only doubting. It is a beautiful feature in the 
angelical hierarchy of the Jews, that the Seraphs rank 
first and the Cherubs after ; that is to say, Love 
before Knowledge. 

MJ3CENAS 

Wielded the Koman empire with rings on his 
little finger. He deserves his immortality as a 
patron of genius ; and yet he was a dandy of the 
most luxurious description amidst the iron and 
marble of old Rome, — the most effeminate of the 
effeminate, as Ney was "bravest of [the brave." The 
secret of this weakness in a great man (for great 
he was, both as a statesman and a discerner of 
greatness in others) was to be found in excessive 
weakness of constitution. 



TABLE-TALK. 159 

LORD SHAFTESBURY'S EXPERIENCE OF 
MATRIMONY. 

Shaftesbury was an honest man and politician, an 
elegant but fastidious writer, and, though a poor 
critic in poetry, could discern and forcibly expose the 
errors of superstition. In one of his letters is an 
extraordinary passage, not much calculated to delight 
the lady whom he married. He said he found 
marriage " not so much ivorse " than celibacy as he 
had expected ! He appears to have had but a sorry 
physique. 

A PHILOSOPHER THROWN FROM HIS HORSE. 

Montaigne was one day thrown with great violence 
from his horse. He was horribly knocked and bruised 
within an inch of his life ; was cast into a swoon ; 
underwent agonies in recovering from it ; and all this 
he noted down, as it were, in the faint light, the 
torn and battered tablets of his memory, during the 
affliction; drawing them forth afterwards for the 
benefit of the reflecting. If you had met such a man 
in the streets, being carried along on a shutter, he 
would have been providing, as well as he was able, for 



160 TABLE-TALK. 

your instruction and entertainment ! This is philo- 
sophy, surely. 

WORLDS OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE. 

"The world!" — The man of fashion means 
St. James's by it ; the mere man of trade means the 
Exchange and a good prudent mistrust. But men of 
sense and imagination, whether in the world of fashion 
or trade, who use the eyes and faculties which God 
has given them, mean His beautiful planet, gorgeous 
with sunset, lovely with green fields, magnificent 
with mountains, — a great rolling energy, full of health, 
love, and hope, and fortitude, and endeavour. Com- 
pare this world with the others. The men of 
fashion's is no better than a billiard-ball ; the money- 
getter's than a musty plum. 

MRS. SIDDONS 

Was a person more admirable than charming, and 
not even so perfectly admirable on the stage, as the 
prevalence of an artificial style of acting in her time 
induced her worshippers to suppose. She was a 
grand and effective actress, never at a loss, and equal 



TABLE-TALK. 161 

to any demands of the loftier parts of passion ; but 
her grandeur was rather of the queen-like and con- 
ventional order, than of the truly heroical. There 
was a lofty spirit in it, but a spirit not too lofty to 
take stage-dignity for the top of its mark. Mrs. 
Siddons was born and bred up in the profession, one 
of a family of actors, and the daughter of a mother of 
austere manners. Mr. Campbell, in his Life of her, 
somewhat quaintly called her "the Great Woman;" 
but I know not in what respect she was particularly 
great as to womanhood. It was queen-hood, not 
womanhood, that was her forte; professional great- 
ness : not that aggregation of gentle and generous 
qualities, that union of the sexually charming and 
the dutifully noble, which makes up the idea of per- 
fection in the woman. 

Great women belong to history and to self-sacrifice, 
not to the annals of a stage, however dignified. 
Godiva gives us the idea of a great woman. So does 
Edward the First's queen, who sucked the poison 
out of his arm. So does Abelard's Eloise, loving 
with all her sex's fondness as long as she could, and 
able, for another's sake, to renounce the pleasures 
of love for the worship of the sentiment. Pasta, 
with her fine simple manner and genial person, may 

11 



162 TABLE-TALK. 

be supposed the representative of a great woman. 
The greatness is relative to the womanhood. It only 
partakes that of the man, inasmuch as it carries to 
its height what is gentle and enduring in both sexes. 
The moment we recognize anything of what is under- 
stood by the word masculine in a woman (not in the 
circumstances into which she is thrown, but in herself 
or aspect), her greatness, in point of womanhood, is 
impaired. She should hereafter, as Macbeth says, 
"bring forth men-children only." Mrs. Siddons's 
extraordinary theory about Lady Macbeth (that she 
was a fragile little being, very feminine to look at) 
was an instinct to this effect, repellent of the associa- 
tion of ideas which people would form betwixt her 
and her personation of the character. 

Mrs. Siddons's refinement was not on a par with 
her loftiness. I remember in the famous sleeping- 
scene in Macbeth, when she washed her hands and 
could not get the blood off, she made " a face " in 
passing them under her nose, as if she perceived a 
foul scent. Now she ought to have shuddered and 
looked in despair, as recognizing the stain on her soul* 



* This trait of character has been mentioned in my Auto- 
biography; but I leave it standing, partly for the sake of completing 
a sketch^ 



TABLE-TALK. 163 

NON-NECESSITY OF GOOD WORDS TO MUSIC. 

Music is an art that in its union with words in 
general may reasonably take, I think, the higher 
place, inferior as it is to poetry in the abstract. For 
when music is singing, the finest part of our senses 
takes the place of the more definite intellect, and 
nothing surely can surpass the power of an affecting 
and enchanting air in awakening the very flower of 
emotion. On this account, I can well understand a 
startling saying attributed to the great Mozart ; that 
he did not care for having good words to his music. 
He wanted only the names (as it were) of the passions. 
His own poetry supplied the rest. 

GOETHE. 

If I may judge of Goethe from the beautiful 
translations of him by Shelley, Carlyle, Anster, and 
others, he had a subtle and sovereign imagination, 
was a master in criticism, was humane, universal, 
reconciling, a noble casuist, a genuine asserter of first 
principles, wise in his generation, and yet possessing 
the wisdom of the children of light. Nevertheless, 
it is a question whether any man daring to think and 



164 TABLE-TALK 

speculate as he has done, would have been treated 
with so much indulgence, if worldly power had not 
taken him under its wing, and had he not shown too 
conventional a taste for remaining there, and falling 
in with one of its most favoured opinions. Goethe 
maintained that the great point for society to strain 
at, was not to advance (in the popular sense of that 
word), but to be content with their existing condition, 
and to labour contentedly every man in his vocation. 
His conclusion, I think, is refuted by the simple fact 
of the existence of hope and endeavour in the nature 
of men. If society is determined never to be satisfied, 
still it will hope to be so ; the hope itself may, for 
aught that can be affirmed to the contrary, be a mere 
part of the work — of the necessary impulse to activity ; 
but there it is — now working harder than ever — and 
a thousand Goethes cannot destroy, though they may 
daunt it. They must destroy hope itself first, and 
life, and death too (which is continually renewing 
the ranks of the hopeful and the young), and above 
all, the press, which will never stop till it has shaken 
the world more even. 

It was easy for a man in Goethe's position to 
recommend people to be content with their own. But 
to be content with some positions, is to be superior 



TABLE-TALK. 165 

to them ; and yet Goethe after all, in his own person, 
was neither superior to, nor content with, the con- 
ventionalities which he found made for him. He 
did not marry the woman he lived with, till circum- 
stances, as he thought, compelled him ; and this was 
late in life. And instead of being superior to his 
condition, as he recommended the poor and struggling 
to be, his very acquiescence in other conventionalities 
showed how little he was so. If this great universalist 
proved his superiority by condescension, it w T as at 
any rate by contracting his wings and his views into 
the court circle, and feathering an agreeable nest 
which he never gave up. Unluckily for the reputa- 
tion of his impartiality, all his worldly advantages 
were on the side of his theory. It is, therefore, im- 
possible to show that it was anything else but a con- 
venient acquiescence. He hazarded nothing to prove 
it otherwise, though, in the instance of his non- 
marriage, he showed how willing he was to depart 
from it where the hazard w T as not too great. In 
England, he would have married sooner, or departed 
from his acquiescences more. 

Goethe, on account of this opinion of his, and the 
position which he occupied, is not popular at present 
in Germany. The partisans of advance there do not 



166 TABLE-TALK. 

like him, perhaps from a secret feeling that they are 
more theoretical than practical themselves, and that 
in this respect he has represented his native country 
too well. For honest Germany, perhaps because she 
is more material than she supposes, and has unwit- 
tingly acquired a number of charities and domes- 
ticities from a certain sensual bonhomie, which has 
given her more to say for herself in that matter than 
she or her transcendentalists would like to own, is 
far more contemplative than active in her politics, 
and willing enough to let other nations play the game 
of advancement, as long as she can eat, drink, and 
dream, without any very violent interruption to her 
self-complacency. Pleasant and harmless may she 
live, with beau ideals (and very respectable ones they 
are) in the novels of Augustus La Fontaine ; and 
may no worse fate befall the rest of the world, if it is 
to get no further. Much of it has not got half so 
far. Her great poet, who partook of the same bon- 
homie to an extent which he would have thought 
unbecoming his dignity to confess, even as a partaker 
of good things, "let the cat out of the bag" in this 
matter a little too ingenuously ; and for this, and the 
court airs they thought he gave himself, his country- 
men will not forgive him. It is easy for his whole- 



TABLE-TALK. 167 

sale admirers, especially for the great understandings 
among them (Mr. Carlyle, for instance), to draw upon 
all the possibilities of an abstract philosophy, and 
give a superfine unworldly reason for whatever he 
did ; but we must take even great poets as we find 
them. Shakspeare himself did not escape the infec- 
tion of a sort of livery servitude among the great (for 
actors were but a little above that condition in his 
time). With all his humanity, he finds it difficult to 
repress a certain tendency to browbeat the people 
from behind the chairs of his patrons; and though 
Goethe, living in a freer age, seldom indulges in this 
scornful mood (for it seems he is not free from it), 
yet it is impossible to help giving a little scorn for 
scorn, or at least smile for smile, when we see the 
poetical minister of state, with his inexperience of 
half the ills of life, his birth, his money, his strength, 
beauty, prosperity, and a star on each breast of his 
coat, informing us with a sort of patriarchal dan- 
dyism, or as Bonaparte used to harangue from his 
throne, that he is contented with the condition of his 
subjects and his own — "France et mot" — and that 
we have nothing to do but to be good people and 
cobblers, and content ourselves with a thousandth 
part of what it would distress him to miss. 



168 TABLE-TALK. 

BACON AND JAMES THE FIRST. 

Bacon, in the exordium of his Advancement of 
Learning, ■ has expressed so much astonishment at 
the talents of King James the First (considering that 
he was "not only a king, but a king born"), that the 
panegyric has been suspected to be a " bold irony." 
I am inclined to think otherwise. Bacon was a born 
courtier, as well as philosopher ; and even his philo- 
sophy, especially in a man of his turn of mind, might 
have found subtle reasons for venerating a being who 
was in possession of a good portion of the power of 
this earth. 

GOLDSMITH'S LIFE OF BEAU NASH. 

Nash is to be added to the list of long livers ; 
and it is worthy of notice that what has been in- 
variably observed of long livers, and appears (with 
temperance or great exercise) to be the only invariable 
condition of their longevity, has not failed in his 
instance : — he was an early riser. 

It has been doubted whether Goldsmith was the 
author of the Life attributed to him. I think, how- 
ever, it bears strong internal marks of his hand, 



TABLE-TALK. 169 

though not in its happiest or most confident moments. 
Its pleasantry is uneasy and overdone, as if conscious 
of having got into company unfit for it ; and some- 
thing of the tawdriness of the subject sticks to him, 
— perhaps from a secret tendency of his own to mix 
up the external character of the fine gentleman " in 
a blossom-coloured coat," with his natural character 
as a writer. Chalmers, the compiler of the Bio- 
graphical Dictionary, who was much in the secrets of 
book-making, appears to have had no doubt on the 
subject. It is not improbable that Goldsmith had 
materials for the Life, by some other person, put into 
his hands, and so made it up by touches of his own, 
and by altering the composition. 

JULIUS CAESAR. 

Csesar was one of the greatest men that ever lived, 
as far as a man's greatness can be estimated from 
his soldiership, and general talents, and personal 
aggrandisement. He had the height of genius in the 
active sense, and was not without it in the contem- 
plative. He was a captain, a writer, a pleader, a 
man of the world, all in the largest as well as most 
trivial points of view, and superior to all scruples, 



170 TABLE-TALK. 

except those which tended to the enlargement of his 
fame, such as clemency in conquest. Whether he 
was a very great man in the prospective, universal, 
and most enduring sense, as a man of his species, 
instead of a man of his time, is another question, 
which must be settled by the growing lights of the 
world and by future ages. He put an end to his 
country's freedom, and did no good, that I am aware 
of, to any one but himself, unless by the production or 
prevention of results known only to Providence. 

FENELON. 

Fenelon was a marvel of a man, — a courtier yet 
independent, a teacher of royalty who really did 
teach, a liberal devotee, a saint in polite life. His 
Telemachus is not a fine poem, as some call it, but it 
is a beautiful moral novel. He had the courage to 
advise Louis XIV. not to marry the bigot Main- 
tenon : and such was the respect borne to his 
character by the Duke of Marlborough and the other 
allied generals, that they exempted his lands at 
Cambray from pillage, when in possession of that 
part of Flanders. The utmost fault that could be 
found with him was, that perhaps the vanity 



TABLE-TALK. 171 

attributed to Frenchmen found some last means of 
getting into a corner of his nature, in the shape of 
an over-studiousness of the feelings of others, and 
an apostolical humility of submission to the religious 
censures of the Pope. Charming blights, to be sure, 
in the character of a Catholic priest. The famous 
Lord Peterborough said of him, in his lively manner, 
" He was a delicious creature. I was obliged to 
get away from him, or he would have made me 
pious." 



SPENSER AND THE MONTH OF AUGUST. 

The word August deserves to have the accent 
taken off the first syllable and thrown upon the 
second (August), not because the month was named 
after Augustus (and yet he had a good deal of 
poetry in him too, considering he was a man of 
the world ; his friend Virgil gives him even a 
redeeming link with the seasons), but because the 
month is truly an august month ; that is to say, 
increasing in splendour till it fills its orb, — majestic, 
ample, of princely beneficence, — clothed with harvest 
as with a garment, full-faced in heaven with its 
moon. 



172 TABLE-TALK. 

Spenser, In his procession of the months, has 
painted him from a thick and lustrous palette : — 



The sixt was August, being rich air; 

In garment all of gold, downe to the ground. 

How true the garment is made by the familiar 
words " all of gold ! " and with what a masterly 
feeling of power, luxuriance, and music, the accent is 
thrown on the word " down ! " Let nobody read a 
great poet's verses either in a trivial or affected 
manner, but with earnest yet deliberate love, dwelling 
on every beauty as he goes. And pray let him very 
much respect his stops : — 

In garment all of gold ; — downe to the ground. 

Yet rode he not, but led a lovely maid 
Forth by the lily hand, the which was crowned 
With ears of corn ; — and full her hand was found. 

Here is a presentation for you, beyond all the 
presentations at court — August, in his magnificent 
drapery of cloth of gold, issuing forth, and presenting 
to earth and skies his Maiden with the lily hand, the 
highest-bred of all the daughters of Heaven — Justice. 
For so the poet continues : — 

That was the righteous Virgin, which of old 
Liv'd here on earth, and plenty made abound ; 
But after Wrong was lov'd, and Justice sold, 
She left th' unrighteous earth, and was to heav'n extolPd. 



TABLE-TALK. 173 

Extolled; that is, in the learned, literal sense, 
raised out of; taken away out of a sphere unworthy 
of her. Ex, out of; and tollo, to lift. 

Many of Spenser's quaintest words are full of 
this learned beauty, triumphing over the difficulty of 
rhyme : nay, forcing the obstacle to yield it a double 
measure of significance, as we see in the instance 
before us ; for the praise given to Justice is here 
implied, as well as the fact of her apotheosis. She 
is, by means of one word, extolled in the literal 
sense ; that is to say, raised up ; and she is extolled 
in the metaphorical sense, which means, praised and 
hymned. 

ADVICE. 

The great secret of giving advice successfully, is 
to mix up with it something that implies a real 
consciousness of the adviser's own defects, and as 
much as possible of an acknowledgment of the other 
party's merits. Most advisers sink both the one and 
the other; and hence the failure which they meet 
with, and deserve. 



174 TABLE-TALK. 

ECLIPSES, HUMAN BEINGS, AND THE LOWER 
CREATION. 

I once noticed a circumstance during an eclipse 
of the sun, which afforded a striking instance of the 
difference between humankind and the lower animal 
creation. The eclipse was so great (it was in the 
year 1820) that night-time seemed coming on ; birds 
went to roost ; and on its clearing away, the cocks 
crew as if it was morning. At the height of the 
darkness, while all the people in the neighbourhood 
were looking at the sun, I cast my eyes on some 
cattle in a meadow, and they were all as intently 
bent with their faces to the earth, feeding. They 
knew no more of the sun, than if there had been no 
such thing in existence. 

Two reflections struck me on this occasion. 
First, what a comment it was on the remarks of 
Sallust and Ovid, as to the prone appetites of brutes 
(obedientia ventri) and the heavenward privilege of 
the eyes of man (coelum tueri) ; and second (as a 
corrective to the pride of that reflection), how 
probable it was that there were things within the 
sphere of our own world, of which humankind were 
as unaware as the cattle, for want of still finer 



TABLE-TALK. 175 

perceptions ; things, too, that might settle worlds of 
mistake at a glance, and undo some of our gravest, 
perhaps absurdest, conclusions. 

This second reflection comes to nothing, except 
as a lesson of modesty. Not so the fine lines of the 
poet, which are an endless pleasure. How grand 
they are ! 

Pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terrain, 
Os homini sublime dedit, ccelumque tueri 
Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus. 

Even Dryden's translation falls short, except in one 
epithet suggested by his creed : — 

Thus, while the mute creation downward bend 
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend, 
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes 
Beholds his own hereditary skies. 

This is good ; and the last line is noble, both in 
structure and idea ; but the phrase " man looks 
aloft," simple and strong as it is, is not so fine as 
man gifted with the " sublime countenance ; " and 
" hereditary skies " convey a modern belief not true 
to the meaning. The Pagans, you know, believed 
that men went into their heaven downwards — into 
Elysium. " The Maker," says Ovid, "gave man 
a sublime countenance " (that is to say, in both 
senses of the word, " elevated ; " for we must here 



176 TABLE-TALK. 

take the literal and metaphorical meaning together), 
"and bade him contemplate the sky, and lift his 
erected visage towards the stars. ,f 

Do not read, with some editions, "coelumque 
videre" which means to " see," and nothing more ; 
but "ccelumque tueri," which means to see with 
" intuition "— with the mind. 



EASTER-DAY AND THE SUN, AND ENGLISH 
POETRY. 

It was once a popular belief, and a very pretty 
one, that the sun danced on Easter-day. Suckling 
alludes to it in his famous ballad : — 

Her feet beneath her petticoat, 
Like little mice, stole in and out, 

As if they fear'd the light ; 
But, oh ! she dances such a way, 
No sun upon an Easter-day 

Is half so fine a sight. 

It is a pity that we have, if not more such beliefs, yet 
not more such poetry, to stand us instead of them. 
Our poetry, like ourselves, has too little animal 
spirits. It has plenty of thought and imagination ; 
plenty of night-thoughts, and day-thoughts too ; and 
in its dramatic circle, a world of action and character. 



TABLE-TALK. 177 

It is a poetry of the highest order and the greatest 
abundance. But though not sombre — though manly, 
hearty, and even luxuriant — it is certainly not a very 
joyous poetry. And the same may be said of our 
literature in general. You clo not conceive the 
writers to have been cheerful men. They often 
recommend cheerfulness, but rather as a good and 
sensible practice than as something which they feel 
themselves. They have plenty of wit and humour, 
but more as satirists and observers than merry 
fellows. Addison was stiff, Swift unhappy, Chaucer 
always looking on the ground. 

The fault is national, and, therefore, it may be 
supposed that we have no great desire to mend it. 
Such pleasure as may be wanting we take out in 
sulks. 

But at more reasonable moments, or over our 
wine, when the blood moves with a vivacity more 
southern, we would fain see the want supplied — fain 
have a little more Farquhar, and Steele, and Tristram 
Shandy. 

Cast your eyes down any list of English writers, 
such, for instance, as that at the end of Mr. Craik's 
History of our Literature, and almost the only names 
that strike you as belonging to personally cheerful 

12 



178 TABLE-TALK. 

men are Beaumont and Fletcher, Suckling, Fielding, 
Farquhar, Steele, O'Keefe, Andrew Marvell, and 
Sterne. That Shakspeare was cheerful, I have no 
doubt, for he was almost everything ; but still it is 
not his predominant characteristic ; which is thought. 
Sheridan could "set the table in a roar;" but it was 
a flustered one, at somebody's expense. His wit 
wanted good-nature. Prior has a smart air, like his 
cap. But he was a rake who became cynical. He 
wrote a poem in the character of Solomon, on the 
vanity of all things. Few writers make you laugh 
more than Peter Pindar : but there was a spice of the 
blackguard in him. You could not be sure of his 
truth or his good-will. 

After all, it is not necessary to be cheerful in 
order to give a great deal of delight ; nor would the 
cheerfulest men interest us as they do, if they were 
incapable of sympathizing with melancholy. I am 
only speaking of the rarity of a certain kind of sun- 
shine in our literature, and expressing a natural 
rainy-day wish that we had a little more of it. It 
ought to be collected. There should be a joyous set 
of elegant extracts — a Literatura Hilaris or Gau- 
dens, — in a score of volumes, that we could have at 
hand, like a cellaret of good wine, against April or 



TABLE-TALK. 179 

November weather. Fielding should be the port, 
and Farquhar the champagne, and Sterne the malm- 
sey ; and whenever the possessor cast an eye on his 
stock, he should know that he had a choice draught 
for himself after a disappointment, or for a friend 
after dinner, — some cordial extract of Parson Adams, 
or Plume, or Uncle Toby, generous as heart could 
desire, and as wholesome for it as laughter for the 
lungs. 

THE FIVE-POUND NOTE AND THE GENTLEMAN. 

It is a curious evidence of the meeting of ex- 
tremes, and of the all-searching eyes of those tre- 
mendous luminaries the daily papers, that a man 
now-a-days cannot commit the shabbiest action in a 
corner, or hug himself never so much upon his 
cunning and privacy, but the next morning he shall 
stand a good chance of having it blazoned to the 
world. An instance occurred the other day. The 
porter of a house in Conduit Street picked up a five- 
pound note. A gentleman met him, who asked if he 
had seen such a thing. He said he had, gave it up, 
and was thanked with " a nod." The gentleman 
retracing his steps, was accompanied a while by the 



180 TABLE-TALK. 

porter ; and the latter, mustering up his courage, in- 
quired if he did not think the circumstance worth a 
pot of beer. The gentleman (for this, his title, is 
judiciously repeated by the newspaper) made no other 
reply than by walking off to the other side of the 
street, " evidently satisfied," says the account, "that 
he was nothing out of pocket by losing his five-pound 
note." 

If this man did not see the porter pick up the 
note, he is one of the shabbiest fellows on record : 
and if he did, he might as well have given him some- 
thing in the gaiety of his heart, if only by way of 
showing that all was right on both sides. 

But was he able to give anything? Could he 
find it in his heart to disburse the fourpence ? Was 
it within the compass of his volition ? For after one's 
first feeling of disgust, a poor devil like this, who 
cannot say his groat's his own, has a right to a 
humane consideration. People are apt to imagine 
that anybody who has fourpence to spare, has nothing 
to do but to put his hand in his pocket and give it. 

B. So he can, if he chooses. 

A. Ay; but he can't choose. 

B. Can't choose ; oh, that is a phrase. You 
don't mean to say it literally? 



TABLE-TALK. 181 

A. Yes, I do. He is literally unable to choose. He 
1 cannot choose if he would. The assertion is odd, and 
seems not very proveable ; but it may be illustrated, 
and proved, too, I think, in a manner easy enough. 
Suppose a man has a paralysis of the arm, and cannot 
lift it ? You request him to lift it ; but he cannot do so. 
He is physically unable. Morally, he wishes to do it ; 
he would choose it ; he thinks himself a poor creature 
for the inability ; but the act is out of his power. 
Now, there are cases in which the moral power is in 
a like miserable condition. Victims of opium have 
been known to be unable to will themselves out of 
the chair in which they were sitting ; and victims of 
miserliness, in like manner, may be unable to will a 
penny out of their pockets. Their volition has a 
paralysis ; and they can no more stir a finger of it, 
than your man with the paralytic arm. 

PAESIELLO. 

Paesiello was one of the most beautiful melodists 
in the world, as the airs of ha Bachelina and To sono 
Lindoro would be sufficient to testify, if he had left 
us none of all his others. Those two are well known 
to the English public under the titles of Whither, my 



182 TABLE-TALK. 

Love, and For Tenderness formed. But they who 
wish to know how far a few single notes can go in 
reaching the depths of the heart, should hear the 
song of poor Nina, II mio ben, in the opera of Nina 
pazza per Amove. The truth and beauty of passion 
cannot go further. 

I admire the rich accompaniments of the Ger- 
mans ; but more accompaniment than the author has 
given to that song would be like hanging an em- 
broidered robe on the shoulders of Ophelia. 

CAKDINAL ALBEKONI. 

Alberoni was the son of a gardener, and lived to 
the age of eighty-seven, sound in his faculties to the 
last. He said a thing remarkable for its address and 
fine taste ; nobler, indeed, than he was probably 
aware of; and a lesson of the very highest theosophy. 
He was a man of vehement temper, as well as open 
discourse, and told a boy one day, who said he feared 
something, that he should "fear nothing, not even 
God himself." 

The company looking shocked and astonished to 
hear such words from the mouth of a cardinal, 
Alberoni added, with a meek air and a softened voice, 



TABLE-TALK. 183 

"For we are to feel nothing towards the good God, 
but love" 



SIR WILLIAM PETTY THE STATIST AND 
MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHER. 

Sir William Petty was the son of a clothier, and 
was founder of the wealth, perhaps of the talent, of 
the Lansdowne family, who bear his name their 
ancestor, the Earl of Kerry, having married his 
daughter. Sir William was a sort of Admirable 
Crichton in money-making ; and he left a curious 
account of his accomplishments that way. Aubrey, 
who knew him, says, that he had at one time been a 
shop -boy ; and that while he was studying physic at 
Paris, he was driven to such straits for a subsistence, 
that " he lived a week or two on three-pennyworth of 
walnuts." 

Sir William was a physician, a surveyor, a 
member of Parliament, a timber-merchant, a political 
writer, a speculator in iron-works, fisheries, and 
lead-mines ; and he wrote Latin verses, and was an 
active fellow of the Eoyal Society. But for the par- 
ticulars of his money-getting see his will, which is a 
curious specimen of a man of his sort, not always 



184 TABLE - TALK, 

such a perfection of human wisdom, as he seems to 
have supposed, but admirable for ingenuity and per- 
severance. He also appears to have been a wag and 
a buffoon ! He " will preach extempore incom- 
parably," says Aubrey, " either in the presbyterian 
way, independent, capuchin friar, or Jesuit."^ 

The same writer tells a pleasant story of him : — 
" Sir Thirom Sankey, one of Oliver Cromwell's 
knights, challenged Petty to fight with him. Petty 
was extremely short-sighted, and being the chal- 
lengee, it belonged to him to nominate place and 
weapon. He nominated, accordingly, a dark cellar 
and a carpenter's axe. This," says Aubrey, "turned 
the knight's challenge into ridicule, and it came to 
nought." 



NAME OF LXNKEUS. 

Linnaeus's father was a clergyman, of a family of 
peasants. The customs of Sweden were so primitive 
at that time, that people under the rank of nobility 
had no surnames ; and, by a sort of prophetic incli- 
nation, the family of Linnceus had designated them- 
selves from a favourite linden or lime-tiee, which 
grew near their abode ; so that Carl von Linne meant 



TABLE-TALK. 185 

Charles of the Lime-tree. The lime was not un- 
worthy of being his godfather. 

JOHN BUNCLE (THE HEEO OF THE BOOK SO 
CALLED). 

Buncle is a most strange mixture of vehement 
Unitarianism in faith, liberality in ordinary judg- 
ment, and jovial selfishness in practice. He is a 
liberal, bigoted, whimsical, lawful sensualist. A 
series of good fortunes of a very peculiar description 
(that is to say, the loss of seven wives in succes- 
sion ! !) enables him to be a kind of innocent Henry 
the Eighth. He argues a lady into the sacred con- 
dition of marriage, spends a delightful season with 
her, she dies in the very nick of time, and he tries as 
hard as he can to grieve for a while, in order that he 
may justify himself all the sooner in taking another. 
This is the regular process for the whole seven ! 
With amazing animal spirits, iron strength, little 
imagination, and a relishing gusto, he is an amusing 
and lively narrator, without interesting our sympathy 
in the least, except in the relish with which he eats, 
drinks, and makes matrimony.* 

* The reader can see, if he pleases, more about this extraordinary 
person in the Book for a Corner. 



186 TABLE-TALK. 

POUSSIN. 

Poussin, like Corneille, was a Norman. The 
addition of the earnest and grave character of the 
Normans to the general French vivacity, rendered 
him one of the great names in art, fit to be men- 
tioned with those of Italy. He had learning, luxuri- 
ousness, and sentiment, and gave himself up to each, 
as his subject inclined him, though never perhaps 
without a strong consciousness of the art as well as 
the nature of what he had to do. His historical per- 
formances are his driest ; his poetical subjects full of 
gusto ; his landscapes remote, meditative, and often 
with a fine darkness in them, as if his trees were 
older than any other painter's. Shade is upon them, 
as light is upon Claude's. 

Poussin was a genuine enthusiast, to whom his 
art was his wealth, whether it made him rich or not. 
He got as much money as he wanted, and would not 
hurry and degrade his genius to get more. 

A pleasant anecdote is related of him, at a time 
when he must have been in very moderate circum- 
stances. He spent the greatest part of his life at 
Home, and Bishop (afterwards Cardinal) Mancini being 
attended by him one evening to the door, for want of 



TABLE-TALK. 187 

a servant, the Bishop said, " I pity you, Monsieur 
Poussin, for having no servant." " And I pity your 
lordship," said the painter, " for having so many." 

The Bishop, by the way, must have been a very 
ill-bred or stupid man, to make such a remark. 
Fancy how beautifully Bishop Bundle, or Berkeley, 
or Thirlwall would not have said it ! What respect 
they would have contrived to show to the non-pos- 
sessor of the servant, without in the smallest degree 
alluding to the non-possession. 

Was there no Koman Duke of Devonshire in 
those days, to teach men of quality how to behave ? 

PRIOR. 

Prior wrote one truly loving verse, if no other. 
It is in his Solomon. The monarch is speaking of a 
female slave, who had a real affection for him — 

And when I calVd another, Abra came. 

BURKE AND PAINE. 

Paine had not the refinements which a nice 
education and a lively fancy had given to Burke. 
He could not discern, as his celebrated antagonist 



18S TABLE-TALK. 

did, " the soul of goodness in things evil," — a noble 
faculty, when evil is to be made the best of. But the 
other's refinements, actuated by his vanity, led him 
to uphold the evil itself, because he could talk finely 
about it, and because others had undertaken to put 
it down without his leave. Self-reference and per- 
sonal importance are at the bottom of everything that 
men do, when they do not show themselves ready to 
make sacrifices to the public good. If the vanity 
still remains the same in many, even when they do, 
it may be pardoned them as an infirmity which does 
not interfere with their usefulness. Burke began 
with being a reformer, and remained one as long as 
he drew attention to himself by it, and could com- 
mand the respect of the " gentilities " among which 
he moved. When he saw, in contradiction to his 
prophecies, that the reform was to move in a wider 
sphere, and that he and his gentilities were not 
necessary to it, he was offended ; turned right round 
to the opposite side ; and wrote a book which 
George III. said every gentleman ought to read. 
" There was a time," says Paine, "when it was im- 
possible to make Mr. Burke believe there would be 
any revolution in France. His opinion then was, 
that the French had neither spirit to undertake nor 



TABLE-TALK. 189 

fortitude to support it : and now that there is one, he 
seeks an escape by condemning it." 

The first French Eevolution was defaced by those 
actions of popular violence which were the result of 
a madness caused by the madness of the aristocracy. 
The foolish system of hostility to France in which 
Englishmen suffered themselves to be brought up by 
those who thought themselves interested in preserving- 
it, easily allowed them to confound the evil with the 
good, and consequently to think ill of its advocates. 
Paine, therefore, was thought to write on a vulgar 
and pernicious side, while Burke had all the eclat 
of the gentilities. 

The most vulgar thing which Paine did, was to 
deny the utility of a knowledge of the dead languages. 
He had none himself; and he saw the knowledge 
often vaunted by men who, having nothing else to 
boast of, possessed of course (in the proper sense of 
the word) not even that. He paid these men the 
involuntary compliment of showing them that Ms 
ignorance of the matter, and theirs, were pretty much 
on a par ; and as they exalted what they did not 
understand, he decried what he was ignorant of. It 
was a piece of inverted aristocracy in him, — a privilege 
of non-possession. ] 



190 TABLE-TALK. 

THE DUTCH AT THE CAPE. 

It is amusing to read of the ponderous indolence 
and cow-like ruminations of the Dutch settlers at the 
Cape of Good Hope. What an admirable word for 
them is " Settlers ! " 

Madame de Stael has given a ludicrous picture of 
the stiffness and formality of an English tea-table. 
Now, a Dutch tea-table is an English one cast 
in lead. 



RUSSIAN HORN BAND. 

This, to be sure, is sounding the very " bass- note 
of humility." A man converted into a crotchet ! An 
a flat in the sixtieth year of his age ! A fellow- 
creature of Alfred and Epaminondas, who has passed 
his life in acting a semitone ! in waiting for his turn 
to exist, and then seizing the desperate instant, and 
being a puff ! * 

* " The Eussian horn music " (says an authority whose name I 
have forgotten) " was invented by Prince Gallitzin, in 1762. This 
instrument consists of forty persons, whose life is spent in blowing 
one note. The sounds produced are precisely similar to those of an 
immense organ, with this difference, that each note seems to blend 
with its preceding and following one ; a circumstance which causes 
a blunt sensation to the ear, and gives a monotony to the whole. 



TABLE-TALK. 191 



DOGS AND THEIR MASTERS. 

Mr. Jesse, in his Anecdotes of Dogs, takes pains 
to prove that the dog is a better man than himself; 
but love dogs as we may, we must not blaspheme 
their master. Dogs have admirable qualities. They 
possess, in particular, a most affecting and super- 
abundant measure of attachment ; of lovingness for 

However, the effect possesses much sublimity when the performers 
are unseen ; but when they are visible, it is impossible to silence 
reflections which jar with their harmony. To see human nature 
reduced to such a use, calls up thoughts very inimical to our 
admiration of strains so awakened. I inquired who the instrument 
belonged to ? (by that word both pipes and men are included), and 
was told it had just been purchased by a nobleman, on the recent 
death of its possessor.* 

" The band consists of twenty-five individuals, who play upon 
about fifty-five horns, all formed of brass of a conical shape, with 
the mouthpiece bent : the lowest of these horns is eight feet long, 
and nine inches in diameter at the larger end, and sounds double a ; 
the highest, which sounds e, is two inches and a half long, by one 
in diameter. Some of the horns, but not all, have keys for one or 
two semitones. When playing, the band is drawn up four deep, the 
trebles in front, and the very low horns laid on tressels at the back, 
so that the performer can raise the mouthpiece with ease, while the 
other end rests on the frame ; one man plays the three lowest horns, 
blowing them in turns as they are wanted. Not the least curious 
portion of this machinery is the conductor, who, with the score 
before him on a desk, stands fronting his troops at what soldiers 
would call the left flank of the company, and continues during the 
whole performance to beat the time audibly by tapping a little stick 
or cane on his desk. And this time he beats, not according to the 

* They were serfs. 



192 TABLE-TALK. 

their human companion ; singular as regards the 
differences of the two beings, and wonderfully and 
beautifully superior to the common notions of self- 
interest : for, as Mr. Jesse's book shows, they are 
capable of quite as much attachment to the poorest 
as to the richest man, and, in the midst of the most 
hardworking and painful existence, will think them- 
selves amply repaid by a crust and a caress. De- 
lightful, admirable, noble, is the loving, hardworking, 
unbribable, martyr- spirited creature called the dog; 
who will die rather than desert his master under the 
most trying circumstances ; who often does die, and 
(so to speak) breaks his heart for him, refusing to 
forsake his dead body or his grave. 



equal divisions in a bar, but the number and quality of notes therein : 
thus, for a bar of fth time, containing one crotchet followed by four 
quavers, he makes five taps, the four last twice as rapid as the first. 
" When the performance began, notwithstanding all we had 
read, although we knew that each demisemiquaver of a rapid octave 
must be breathed by a separate individual, we were astonished at 
the unity of effect and correctness of time ; and this feeling con- 
tinued undiminished to the end. But to this our pleasure and 
approbation were confined, and all moral considerations apart, we 
soon began to feel regret and pain that so much labour should have 
been bestowed on forming what may, probably, be a very first-rate 
band of Russian horns, but what is certainly a very second-rate 
band of wind instruments. There is no expression, no colouring in 
the performance ; and though the tone produced by the bass horns 
is extremely fine and powerful, and the tenors are soft and mellow, 
the trebles are shrill, and very frequently sadly out of tune." 



TABLE-TALK. 193 

But still he must not be compared with the equally 
loving, more tried, and more awful creature called 
Man, with his conflicting thoughts, his greater temp- 
tations, his "looking before and after," his subjection, 
by reason of his very superiority, to the most dis- 
tressing doubts, fears, distracting interests, manifold 
ties, impressions of this world and the next; imagina- 
tions, consciences, responsibilities, tears. Between 
the noblest and most affectionate dog that dies out 
of a habit of love for his master, and the many- 
thoughted, many-hearted human being, who, loving 
existence and his family, can yet voluntarily face the 
gulf of futurity for some noble purpose, there is as 
much difference as between a thoughtless impulse 
and a motive burdened with the greatest drawbacks. 

Thus much for the idle sentences quoted from 
Monsieur Blaze, Lord Byron, and others, about the 
superiority of dogs to men ; things written in moments 
of spleen or ill-will ; contradicted by the writers in 
other passages; and thoughtlessly echoed, out of 
partiality to his subject, by kindly Mr. Jesse. 



13 



194 TABLE-TALK. 



BODY AND MIND. 



Pascal, in spite of his wisdom, was a victim to 
hypochondria and superstition. He was an admirable 
mathematician, reasoner, wit, and a most excellent 
man ; and yet, notwithstanding this union of the most 
solid and brilliant qualities, a wretched constitution 
sometimes reduced him to a state which idiots might 
have pitied. As if his body had not been ill-treated 
enough, he wore an iron girdle with points on it next 
his skin ; and he was in the habit of striking this 
girdle with his elbow, when a thought which he 
regarded as sinful or vain, came across him. During 
his latter days, he imagined that he saw an abyss by 
the side of his chair, and that he was in danger of 
falling into it. How modest it becomes the ablest 
men to be, and thankful for a healthier state of blood, 
when they see one of the greatest of minds thus 
miserably treated by the case it lived in ! 

WANT OF IMAGINATION IN THE COMFORTABLE. 

People in general have too little imagination, and 
habit does not tend to improve it. The comfort, 
therefore, which they have derived ever since they 



TABLE-TALK. 195 

were born from sustenance and warmth, they come to 
identify with the habitual feelings of everybody : and 
though they read in the newspapers of the want of 
bread and fuel among the poor, it is with the utmost 
difficulty, and by a violent forcing of the reflection, that 
they can draw a distinction between the sensations of 
the poor man's flesh and stomach, and those of their 
own. Hunger with themselves is brief: they can 
soon satisfy it. Cold is brief : they can go to the 
fire. They become unable to sympathize with the 
continuous operation of want. They think the poor 
man talks about cold and hunger, and that there 
must be some reason in it, inasmuch as he looks ill ; 
for they can picture to their imaginations a care-worn 
face, since they see so many about them, where the 
hands are warm, and the stomachs well fed. But 
still, as their own hands are in the habit of being 
warm, and their stomachs comfortable, or at any rate 
uncomfortable with fulness, they have no abiding 
conception of hands cold for a whole day, or of an 
habitual craving for food. 

I do not mean to say that it would be desirable for 
people to be over- sensitive on these points ; otherwise 
the distress of half a dozen of human beings would 
be sufficient to discomfort- the whole globe. It is to 



196 TABLE-TALK, 

be hoped that the martyrs to reform and imagination 
will have suffered enough eventually, to secure the 
infinite preponderance of good in this world. But, 
meanwhile, its advance is the slower for it, and the 
apathy of the excessively comfortable sometimes not 
a little provoking. 

Take one of the clergymen for instance, who have 
been writing addresses of late to the poor, to advise 
them to bear hunger and cold with patience. One of 
these gentlemen sits down to his writing-table, with 
his feet on a rug, before a good fire, after an excel- 
lent breakfast, to recommend to others the endurance 
of evils, the least part of which would rouse him 
into a remonstrance with his cook or his coal-mer- 
chant, perhaps destroy his temper, and put him in a 
state of un-Christian folly. "Bless me!" cries he, 
looking about him, if there is the least bit of a 
" crick " in the window, " how intolerably cold it is 
this morning ! " and he rises from his chair, and not 
without indignation closes the intolerable window 
which the servant had so "shamefully neglected." 
His dinner is not ready when he returns from his 
ride. " 'Tis very shameful of the cook," quoth he : 
" I have eaten nothing to signify since breakfast, and 
am ready to sink." The dinner is brought in with 



TABLE-TALK. 197 

all trepidation, and he does sink, — that is to say, 
into an easy chair ; and fish, flesh, and fowl sink into 
him. Little does he think, and less does he endea- 
vour to think (for the thought is not a comfortable 
one), that the men to whom he wrote his address in 
the morning, are in the habit of feeling this sinking 
sensation from morning till night, and of seeing their 
little crying children suffering from a distress which 
they know to be so wretched. Many of these poor 
people sink into the grave ; and the comfortable 
clergyman thinks it much if he gets into his carriage, 
or puts his warm greatcoat and handkerchief round 
his portly neck, and goes to smooth the poor man's 
passage to that better world, which he himself will 
keep aloof from, as long as port and pheasant can 
help him. 

What riches give us, let us then inquire : 

Meat, fire, and clothes. What more ? Meat, clothes, and fire. 

These are the three great necessaries of life, 
meaning by meat, food. After a few lines to show 
the insufficiency of superfluities for rendering bad 
men happy, the poet says of these superfluities : — 

Perhaps you think the poor might have their part : 
Bond damns the poor, and hates them from his heart. 
The grave Sir Gilbert holds it for a rule, 
That every man in want is knave or fool. 



198 TABLE-TALK 

" God cannot lore (says Blunt, with tearless eves) 
The wretch he starves " — and piously denies ; 
But the good hishop, with a meeker air, 
Admits, and leaves them, Providence's care. 



THE SINGING- MAN KEPT BY THE BIRDS. 

Want of Imagination plays strange tricks with 
most people. I will tell you a fable. 

A traveller came into an unknown country where 
the people were more like birds than men, and twice 
as tall as the largest ostriches. They had beaks and 
wings, and lived in gigantic nests, upon trees of a 
proportionate size. The traveller, who was unfortu- 
nately a capital singer, happened to be indulging in 
one of his favourite songs, when he was overheard by 
a party of this monstrous people, who caught him 
and carried him home. Here he led such a life as 
made him a thousand times wish for death. The 
bird family did not seem to be cruel to one another, 
or even intentionally so to him ; for they soon found 
out what he liked to eat, and gave him plenty of it. 
They also flattened him a corner of the nest for a 
bed ; and were very particular in keeping out of his 
way a pet tiger which threw him into the most 
dreadful agitations. But in all other respects, 



TABLE-TALK. 199 

whether out of cruelty or fondness, or want of 
thought, they teased him to death. His habitation, 
at best, was totally unfit for him. His health 
depended upon exercise, particularly as he was a 
traveller; but he could not take any in the nest, 
because it was hollow like a basin ; and had he 
attempted to step out of it, he would have broken his 
neck. Sometimes they would handle him in then- 
great claws, till his heart beat as if it would come 
through his ribs. Sometimes they kissed and 
fondled him with their horrid beaks. Sometimes 
tliey pulled his nose this way and that, till he gaped 
and cried out for anguish ; upon which they would 
grin from ear to ear, and stroke back his head, till 
the hairs came out by the roots. If he did not sing, 
they would pull his arms about, and cruelly spread 
out his fingers, as if to discover what was the matter 
with him; and when he did sing to beguile his 
sorrows, he had the mortification of finding that they 
looked upon it as a mark of his contentment and 
happiness. They would sing themselves (for some of 
them were pretty good singing-birds for so coarse a 
species), to challenge him, as it were, to new efforts. 
At length our poor traveller fell sick of a mortal 
distemper, the termination of which was luckily 



200 TABLE-TALK. 

hastened by the modes they took to cure it. 
" Wretch that I am!" cried he, in his last, 
moments, "I used to think it unmanly to care 
about keeping a goldfinch, or even a lark ; but all 
my manliness, in a like situation, cannot prevent 
me from dying of torture." 

A STRANGE HEAVEN. 

I have often thought (don't be frightened) that if 
any one set of men ought to go to heaven more than 
another, it's rascals ! Consider what fools the poor 
fellows are ; what frights they undergo ; what 
infamy they get ; what ends they often come to ; 
and, in most cases, what "births, parentages, and 
educations," they must have had. Or, if their 
anxieties have not been in proportion to their 
rascality, then consider what it is to want the 
feelings of other men ; what bad pleasures it betrays 
them into ; and of what good ones it deprives them. 
Think of those miserable dogs among them, who 
have never even succeeded as rascals. Fancy Dick 
Dreary in his old age, toothless, despised, diseased, 
dejected, conscious that he has been all in the wrong, 
and unable to pay for a bit of fire in the winter to 



TABLE-TALK. 201 

comfort his petty-larceny fingers. Is he to have 
nothing for all this ? Oh, depend upon it, that if he 
has not had it already, of some unaccountable sort or 
other (which brings matters round), your rascal must 
come right somehow. 

B. Theologians have various ways for settling 
that. 

A. Yes, but not for all; and positively one single 
poor devil must not be omitted ; — no, not even 
though he be a Calvinist or an Inquisitor. Heavenly 
notions of justice are not to be at the mercy of the 
most infernal stupidity of mind. — If I were a 
preacher, my doctrines would not go to flatter the 
poor dogs into crime with notions of certain kinds of 
absolution, which in that case it would be doubly 
infernal to refuse them. I should treat them as the 
fools which no men like to be called ; but, at the same 
time, as the pitiable fools which such men un- 
doubtedly are. 

Grave Gentleman. But a positive heaven for 
rascals ! 

A. {laughing.) Oh, oh, verbum sat. Dante has 
heavens for his rascals ; — heavens even for the Em- 
peror Constantine and the slayer of the Albigenses. 
Why mayn't we find a little blushing corner or 



202 TABLE-TALK. 

so for Muggins, and Father Rack, and poor Dick 
Dreary ? 



STANDING GODFATHEK. 

To stand* godfather is, I know, reckoned a very 
trifling ceremony : people ask it of others, either to 
gratify their own vanity or that of the person asked ; 
they think nothing of the Heaven they are ahout 
to invoke. It is looked upon as a mere gos- 
siping entertainment : a few child's squalls, a few 
mumbled amens, and a few mumbled cakes, and a 
few smirks accompanied by a few fees, and it is all 
over. The character and the peculiar faith of the 
promisers have nothing to do with it : the child's 
interest has nothing to do with it ; the person most 
benefited is the parson, who is thinking all the time 
what sort of a present he shall get. Now, observe 
what I must do, should I undertake to be a godfather. 
I must come into the presence of God — a presence 
not to be slighted though in a private room — to 
worship him with a falsehood in my mouth : that is, 
to make him a profession of faith which I do not 
understand ; I must then promise him to teach the 
child this very faith which I do not understand, and 



TABLE-TALK. 203 

to guard her youth from evil ways ; when it is very 
probable I shall never be with her or see her, and 
most likely, if I did see her, I should get my head 
broken by her relations for giving impertinent advice. 
Considered in itself, I think the idea of christening a 
child and answering for what one cannot possibly 
foresee, a very ridiculous one ; but when Heaven is 
called upon and the presence of the Deity invoked to 
witness it, it becomes a serious ceremony though it 
may be an erroneous one, and the invocation of the 
Deity is not to be sported with even on an erroneous 
occasion. 



MAGNIFYING TRIFLES. 

Affection, like melancholy, .magnifies trifles; but 
the magnifying of the one is like looking through a 
telescope at heavenly objects ; that of the other, like 
enlarging monsters with a microscope. 

RELICS. 

It is amusing to think how the world neglect 
great men, and how they value their most paltry 
memorials ; and yet it shows the happy tendency of 



204 TABLE - TALK. 

every trifle to keep up their reputation. Thus the 
warrior who is ungratefully used by his country, 
may obtain his reward after death by his cap or his 
sword ; a poet may be immortalized among the vulgar 
by the chair in which he used to write; and the 
beautiful Mary Stuart triumph over her rival Eliza- 
beth by the mere force of a miniature. Sometimes, 
indeed, this deification of kickshaws may be abused : 
the Roman Catholics have five or six legs, original 
legs, of the same saint, in five or six different places, 
so that either five of the claimants tell us a story, or 
the saint must have been a monster : they are also a 
little too apt to suppose every tombstone they dig up 
in Italy to have been a saint's or a martyr's, and 
they deify the names they find upon them, which for 
aught we know may have belonged to overseers of 
the road, or some of the greatest scoundrels in ancient 
Rome, or perhaps even to the persecutors of the 
primitive Christians. 

SOLITUDE. 

Hermits might have been very comfortable for 
aught I know, but I am persuaded there is no such 
thing, after all, as a perfect enjoyment of solitude, 



TABLE-TALK. 205 

for the more delicious the solitude the more one 
wants a companion. 

LOUIS XIV. AND GEORGE IV. 

Louis XIV. was like George IV., inasmuch as he 
was fond of pleasure ; but his ambition rendered him 
at once a better and a worse man than the latter, for 
it made him fonder of literature and the arts, which 
he knew would immortalize him, and it plunged him 
into a hundred useless wars, which the latter has 
never been able to undertake, and, probably, never 
would have undertaken, as he is so grossly indolent ; 
for I do not think his virtues would preserve him 
from any error. In short, if the vices of Louis had 
greater opportunity to extend themselves than those 
of George, the Frenchman was, nevertheless, more 
sensible, more tasteful, more refined in his pleasures, 
more like a prince. He was more like the Emperor 
Augustus, except that he became a religious bigot in 
his old age — the common end of many a vicious man 
who is disappointed. 



206 TABLE - TALK. 

HENRY IV. OF FRANCE AND ALFRED. 

My two favourite princes are Henry IV. of France 
and our own Alfred ; the one, though he was a man 
of gallantry (which is to be pardoned, in a great 
measure, in a Frenchman of his time), was never 
depraved, never lost the goodness of his heart, and 
he was a perfect hero of chivalry, as well as a philo- 
sopher in adversity : the 'other is the most perfect 
character in the list of monarchs of any age or 
country, a man who has come down to posterity 
without a single vice; — a warrior, a legislator, a poet, 
a musician, a philosopher — a mixture of everything 
great and small that renders us dignified, wise, or 
accomplished : a combination, indeed, 

Where ev'ry god did seem to set his seal 
To give the world assurance of a man. 

You see I must have recourse to Shakspeare. No- 
body but such a writer can describe such a king. 



FELLOWS OF COLLEGES. 

These Fellows are absolute monks, without 
monkish superstition or restraint ; they live luxu- 



TABLE-TALK. 207 

riously, walk, ride, read, and have nothing to get, in 
this world, but a good appetite of a morning. 



BEAUTY A JOY IN HEAYEN. 

Beauty of every kind, poeticized, comes into the 
composition of my heaven — beauty of thinking, beauty 
of feeling, beauty of talking, beauty of hearing, and, 
of course, beauty of seeing, including visions of 
beautiful eyes and beautiful turns of limb. 

ASSOCIATIONS OF GLASTONBURY. 

Glastonbury is a town famous in old records for 
the most ancient abbey in the kingdom, for being the 
supposed birthplace of King Arthur, and for pro- 
ducing a species of whitethorn which was said to bud 
miraculously on Christmas day; St. Joseph of Ari- 
mathea, it seems, having stuck his walking-stick in 
the ground on his arrival here, upon which the earth 
expressed its sense of the compliment by turning it 
into a thorn in blossom. Glastonbury is said to be 
the burial-place of King Arthur ; but I am afraid the 
truth is, that he was buried in the same place in 
which he was born and lived, — the brain of a poet. 



208 TABLE-TALK. 



LIBERTY OF SPEECH. 



Whenever we feel ourselves in the possession of 
such a liberty and confidence of sociality as are not 
to be found in France or Turkey, then I must beg 
leave to return my thanks to the Hampdens, the 
Holts, Andrew Marvells, and other old English free- 
men, whose exertions, acting upon us to this very 
day, enable us to say and to enjoy what we do. 

WRITING POETRY. 

Poetry is very trying work, if your heart and 
spirits are in it ; particularly with a weak body. The 
concentration of your faculties, and the necessity and 
ambition you feel to extract all the essential heat of 
your thoughts, seem to make up that powerful and 
exhausting effect called inspiration. The ability to 
sustain this, as well as all other exercises of the 
spirit, will evidently depend, in some measure, upon 
the state of your frame ; so that Dryden does not 
appear to have been altogether so fantastical in dieting 
himself for a task of verse ; nor Milton and others, in 
thinking their faculties stronger at particular periods : 
though the former, perhaps, might have rendered his 



TABLE - TALK. 20 

caution unnecessary by undeviating temperance ; and 
the latter have referred to the sunshine of summer, 
or the in-door snugness of frosty weather, what they 
chose to attribute to a loftier influence. 

THE WOMEN OF ITALY. 

The general aspect of the women in Italy is striking, 
but not handsome ; that is to say, stronger marked 
and more decided than pleasing. But when you do 
see fine faces, they are fine indeed ; and they have 
all an intelligence and absence of affectation, very 
different from that idea of foreigners which the 
French are apt to give people. 

FRENCH PEOPLE. 

The French are pleasant in their manner, but 
seem to contain a good deal of ready-made heat and 
touchiness, in case the little commerce of flattery and 
sweetness is not properly carried on. There are a 
great many pretty girls, but I see no fine-faced old 
people, which is not a good symptom. Nor do the 
looks of the former contain much depth, or senti- 
ment, or firmness of purpose. They seem made like 
their toys, not to last, but to play with and break up. 

14 



210 TABLE-TALK. 



THE BLIND. 

It is very piteous to look at blind people ; but 
it is observed that they are generally cheerful 
because others pay them so much attention ; and one 
would suffer a good deal, to be continually treated 
with love. 



LONDON. 

London, as you say, is not a poetical place to 
look at ; but surely it is poetical in the very amount 
and comprehensiveness of its enormous experience 
of pain and pleasure — a Shakspearian one. It is one 
of the great giant representatives of mankind, with 
a huge beating heart ; and much of the vice even, 
and misery of it (in a deep philosophical considera- 
tion), is but one of the forms of the movement of a 
yet unsteadiecl progression, trying to balance things, 
and not without its reliefs ; though, God knows, there 
is enough suffering to make us all keep a look-out 
in advance. 



TABLE-TALK. 211 



SOUTHEY'S POETRY. 

I believe you are right about Southey's poetry, 
and cry mercy to it accordingly. He went to it too 
mechanically, and with too much nonchalance ; and 
the consequence was a vast many words to little 
matter. Nor had he the least music in him at all. 
The consequence of which was, that he wrote prose 
out into lyrical wild shapes, and took the appearance 
of it for verse. Yet there was otherwise a poetical 
nature distributed through the mass, idly despising 
the concentration that would have been the salvation 
of it. 



VULGAR CALUMNY. 

I believe that one part of the public will always, if 
they can, calumniate any man who tries to amend 
them, and whom therefore they conclude to be their 
superior ; but the great part, perhaps these included, 
will nevertheless be always willing to read one, pro- 
vided they are amused by one's writings. 



212 TABLE-TALK. 

VALUE OF ACQUIREMENTS. 

Acquirements of every sort increase our powers 
of doing good, both to ourselves and others ; and the 
knowledge of languages — of any language almost — 
may turn out of the greatest service to us in 
advancing our prospects in life. The knowledge of 
French, — and I have no doubt the case is the same 
with that of Italian, of Spanish, of German, &c, 
— has been known to give a young man great and 
sudden advantages over his fellows, and send him 
abroad upon the most interesting and important 
commissions. Suppose a messenger were required, 
for instance, to go on the sudden upon some urgent 
matter of government business to another country, 
and none were immediately to be had. A clerk 
starts up who understands Italian, and is despatched 
in a hurry to Eome or Turin. Suppose an assistant 
botanist is required to explore an Eastern country ; 
what an advantage the knowledge of Arabic or 
Persian would give him, over competitors ignorant 
of those languages ! Somebody has said that a man 
who understood four languages besides his own, was 
five men instead of one. 



TABLE-TALK. 213 

THE BEARD. 

Physicians proclaim it to be a "natural respi- 
rator; " it is manifestly a clothing and a comfort to 
the jaws and throat, ergo, probably, to regions adjoin- 
ing ; it is manly ; it is noble ; it is handsome. Think 
of all those beards of old, under tents and turbans ; 
think of them now — how the whole East is bearded 
still, as it ever was, and ever will be, beard without 
end. The Chinese, it is true, are unbearded ; but 
that was a Tartar doing, the work of the dynasty that 
is now being ousted. Confucius came before it, and 
had a beard as profound as his philosophy, you may 
rest assured. How else would the philosophy have 
come ? — how have brooded to such purpose ? — been 
so warm in his " nares " (as you justly observe) or 
so flowing towards his fellow-creatures. 

ATTRACTIONS OF HAM. 

Old trees, the placidest of rivers, Thomson up 
above you, Pope near you, Cowley himself not a 
great way off ; I hope here is a nest of repose, both 
material and spiritual, of the most Cowleian and 
Evelynian sort. Ham, too, you know, is expressly 



214 TABLE-TALK. 

celebrated both by Thomson and Armstrong ; and 
though that infernal Duke of Lauderdale lived there, 
who put people to the rack (in the first old original 
Ham House, I believe — he married a Dysart), yet 
even the bitter taste of him is taken out of the 
mouth by the sweets of these poets, and by the 
memories of the good Duke and Duchess of Queens- 
berry (Prior's Kitty), who nursed their friend Gay 
there when he was ill. Ay, and when he was well ; 
and upon ham as well as in it ; for you know he was 
a great eater ; which made him, of course, ill again ; 
and then they fed him on teas, and syllabubs, and 
ladies'-fingers, and again made him well, and able to 
be ill another time. And he was a punster too, was 
Gay, and doubtless punned as well as feasted on ham. 

SLEEPING UNDER THE SKY. 

The other day I had a delicious sleep in a haycock. 
These green fields and blue skies throw me into a 
kind of placid intoxication. Are there many moments 
more delicious than the one in which you feel your- 
self going to slumber, with the sense of green about 
you, of an air in your face, and of the great sky arch- 
ing over your head ? One feels, at such times, all the 



TABLE-TALK. 215 

grandeur of planetary consciousness without the pain 
of it. You know what I mean. There is a sort of 
kind and beautiful sensuality in it which softens the 
cuts and oppressiveness of intellectual perception. 
Certainly, a country so green as England cannot well 
be equalled by any other at such a season. 

WAR POETRY. 

You may judge what I felt about the war sonnets, 
when I opened the book on the one beginning — ■ 

Blaze gun to gun, &c. &c, 
with that affectation of encouraging "living mires," 
and "hells of fire," which is or ought to be revolting 
to a poet's heart, and is not at all his business : for 
to say it is necessary to oppose the "commonplaces 
of humanity " with such outrages upon them, is itself 
a commonplace, however it may seem otherwise to 
the unreflecting. Mankind are always too ready to 
continue the barbarism, war; and whatever may be 
the unavoidableness of it, or even the desirableness 
of it, at some particular moment, when forced upon 
us by barbarism itself, it is not the poet's business 
to lay down his harp of Orpheus and halloo bru- 
talities on. 



216 TABLE-TALK. 

And as to God's permission, and therefore use of 
such things, we might as well encourage, instead of 
piously helping to do away, any other evils through 
which, or in spite of which, good mysteriously pro- 
gresses, and strike up howls in praise of murder in 
ordinary and Bartholomew massacres. Such mis- 
takes vex one in men of genius, who ought to know 
better. 



MONEY-GETTING. 

You are right about money-getting in the main, 
horrible as are the abuses of it, and provoking some- 
times its predominance. Besides, it is a phase of 
things through which all the world must go, till they 
have all made acquaintance with one another, — and 
all interchanged their goods and knowledges; by 
which time it is to be hoped they will all have dis- 
covered the means and advantages of obtaining more 
leisure, varying the pursuit, and exalting its objects : 
for I suppose we are not to believe that the world is 
to go on through countless millions of ages precisely 
as it does at this or any other moment, merely 
because Jones trades with Thompson, and Smith is a 
pork-butcher, 



TABLE-TALK. . 217 

VALUE OF WORDS. 

Words are often things also, and very precious, 
especially on the gravest occasions. Without " words " 
and the truth of things that is in them, what were 
we? 



UNWRITTEN REVELATIONS. 

The only two hooks of paramount authority with 
me are the Book of Nature, and the heart of its 
reader, Man ; and that the operations in the one, 
and the aspirations of the other (though I fully con- 
cede, as I am hound to do, all the reconcilements, 
and possibilities, and transcendentations of every 
kind, which greater understandings and imaginations 
than my own may see in other hooks), compel me — 
if so glad a conclusion can be called compulsion — to 
he of the opinion that God is the unmingled, wholly 
benevolent, and conscious spirit of Good, working- 
through His agent, Man ; that evil, where it is evil, 
and not a necessary portion of good (as it probably 
all is ultimately) is the difficulty presented to the 
course of this working by the unconscious, invo- 
luntary, and therefore unmalignant, mystery called 



218 TABLE-TALK. 

Matter ; that God, though not immediately or in all 
stages of His processes almighty, is ultimately so ; 
and that His constant occupation is the working out 
of heavens in place and time, in which prospection 
and retrospection somehow or other hecome recon- 
ciled to the final conscious beatitude of all the souls 
that have ever existed. 



WEEPING. 

It is an affecting, and would he a startling con- 
sideration, to think, that God has given us tears for 
such express purposes of relief, as knowing how much 
our sorrows would need them, were not this very 
fact, among others, a proof (at least, it is a great evi- 
dence to myself), that all other needs of our affections 
are destined to be made up to us in good time ; for 
tears, though they calm the first outbreaks of afflic- 
tion, do not suffice for its subsequent yearnings ; and 
as those yearnings continue — often with great returns 
of anguish to the last — sufficingness, I think, remains 
in store for them also. I should be one of the 
unhappiest, instead of the most resigned of men, at 
this moment, if I did not constantly, and as it were 
instinctively, feel that I should rejoin all the dear 



TABLE-TALK. 219 

ones whom I have lost — words that now, as I 
write, wring bitter and unsufficing tears from the 
quivering of the soul within me. Encourage and, 
as it were, throw yourself heartily into the arms of 
this expectation ; think how worthy it is, both of 
man and God, quite apart from the dogmas which 
too often render both so much the reverse ; and, 
meantime, act in every respect with regard to your 
dear one just as you feel sure she tvould loish you 
to act, weeping as plentifully as you need, but as 
patiently too, and considering her as only gone before 
you, to be rejoined : she, all the while, being delivered 
from all her pain, spiritual as well as bodily, be- 
cause she now possesses that certainty, as a disem- 
bodied spirit, which, for some finally good purpose, it 
is not fit that we, who are yet on earth, should possess 
ourselves. For my part, I confess to you that I 
often feel it highly probable that the spirits of my 
own beloved dead are in the room with me, and that 
they feel a special and heavenly pleasure by seeing 
that I do so, and by knowing the comfort it gives me. 
I count this no kind of madness, but one of the 
heights of reason ; for it does not unfit me for the 
common work of life, but, on the contrary, helps it ; 
and as it neither fevers me, nor is caused by any 



220 TABLE-TALK. 

fever itself, I count it not among the unhealthy, but 
the healthy capabilities of my nature ; therefore of 
anybody else's nature who chooses reasonably to 
enjoy it. 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 



OP 



POPE AND SWIFT 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 



OF 



POPE AND SWIFT. 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 

REPORTED BY A TOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO DINED WITH HIM. 

July 4, 1727. 

Yesterday was a day of delight. I dined with 
Mr. Pope. The only persons present were the 
venerable lady his mother, Mrs. Martha Blount, and 
Mr. Walscott, a great Tory, but as great a lover of 
Dryden ; which Mr. Pope was pleased to inform me 
was the reason he had invited me to meet him. 
Mr. Pope was in black, with a tie-wig. I could not 
help regarding him, as he sat leaning in his arm- 
chair before dinner, in the light of a portrait for 
posterity. When he came into the room, after kindly 
making me welcome, he took some flowers out of a 



224 TABLE - TALK. 

little basket that he had brought with him, and pre- 
sented them, not to Mrs. Martha, who seemed to 
look as if she expected it, but to Mrs. Pope ; which 
I thought very pretty and like a gentleman, not in 
the ordinary way. But the other had no reason to 
be displeased ; for turning to her with the remainder, 
he said, "I was thinking of a compliment to pay 
you ; so I have done it." He flatters with as much 
delicacy as Sir Richard Steele ; and the ladies like it 
as much from him. What fine-shaped fellows have 
I seen, who could not call up half such looks into 
their eyes ! 

I was in a flutter of spirits, which took away my 
appetite. Mr. Pope recommended his fish and his 
Banstead mutton to no purpose. I was too well fed 
with hearing him talk. However, I mechanically 
drank his wine ; which emboldened me to say some- 
thing. What I said, I do not very well remember, 
and it is no matter. I have even forgotten some 
agreeable stories related by Mr. Walscott, about the 
civil wars ; but every word that passed the lips of 
Mr. Pope seems engraven on my brain. From the 
subject of killing mutton, the talk fell upon cruelty 
to animals ; upon which Mr. Pope made some excel- 
lent observations. He began by remarking how 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 225 

strange it was, that little or nothing had been said 
of it in books. 

Mr. Walscott. I suppose authors have been 
too much in the habit of attending to the operation 
of their own minds. 

Mr. Pope. But they have been anglers. I have 
a curious book in my library, written by one Isaac 
Walton, an old linen-draper in the time of Charles 
the Second, who was fond of meadows and village 
alehouses, and has really a pretty pastoral taste. 
This man piques himself on his humanity ; and yet 
the directions he gives on the subject of angling (for 
the book is written on that art) are full of such 
shocking cruelty, that I do not care to repeat them 
before ladies. He wrote the lives of Donne, Hooker, 
and others, all anglers, and good religious men. Yet 
I suppose they were all as cruel. It is wonderful 
how the old man passes from pious reflections to the 
tortures of fish and worms, just as if pain were 
nothing. Yet what else are the devil and his doings 
made of? 

Mr. Walscott. Dryden was an angler. 

Mr. Pope. Yes ; he once exclaimed of D'Urfey, 
"He fish!" because the man attempted to write. 
There is a passage in his Astrcea Redux, written in 

15 



226 TABLE-TALK. 

the proper fishing spirit ; that is to say, in which all 

the consideration is for the fisher, and none for the fish. 

Mr. Walscott. I remember it. He is speaking 

of General Monk, and the way in which he brought 

about the grand stroke for the Restoration : — 

'Twas not the hasty product of a day, 
But the well-ripen'd fruit of wise delay. 
He, like a patient angler, ere he strook, 
Would let him play a while upon the hook. 

Me. Pope. The " patient angler ! " Mighty 
patient truly, to sit at a man's ease and amuse him- 
self ! The question is, what the fish think of it. 

Mrs. Martha Blount. Sure it must be so ; 
and yet I never once thought of that before. God 
forgive me for the murders I committed last year in 
Oxfordshire, at the instigation of my brother. 

Mr. Pope looked at her with benevolence as she 
said this ; but he was too much in earnest to pay her 
the compliments which ordinary gallantry would have 
struck out of the confession. I really believe he feels 
as much for carp and trout, as most men do for each 
other. 

Mr. Walscott. But would it not be exchanging 
one pain for another, to make people think too much 
of these things ? 

Mr. Pope. That is well said. But I know not 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 227 

what right we have to continue putting our fellow- 
creatures to pain, for the sake of avoiding it ourselves. 
Besides, there is a pain that exalts the understanding 
and morals, and is not unallied with pleasure : which 
cannot be said of putting hooks into poor creatures' 
jaws and bowels. 

Mr. Walscott. There is a good deal in that. 
Yet all animals prey upon one another. We prey 
upon them ourselves. We are at this minute 
availing ourselves of the cruelties of butchers and 
fishermen. 

Mr. Pope. Not the cruelties. Killing and 
torturing are different. Death is inevitable to all; 
and a sheep who has passed his days in the meadows, 
and undergone a short death from a knife, has had 
as good a bargain as most of us. Animals kill, but 
they do not torture one another. 

Mr. Walscott. I think I have read of instances. 
Yes, I am sure of it ; and what think you of the cat 
with a mouse ? 

Mr. Pope. Why, I think she is very like an 
angler. I should wish to see a treatise on the 
subject by a cat. It is a meditative creature, like 
old Isaac, and is fond of fish. I am glad to see how 
much the f era natura excuses them both; but to us, 



228 TABLE-TALK. 

who can push our meditations farther, the excuse is 
not the same. 

Mr. Walscott. Yet this appears to be instinct. 
What say you to nature ? It is her own doing. 

Mr. Pope. Nature is a very wide term. We 
make use of it rather to get rid of arguments, than 
to enforce them. If it is the cat's nature to torment, 
it is man's nature to know better. Improvement is 
nature. The reflections we are now making are 
nature. I was wrong in saying that no animal 
tortures another; but pray observe, — we abuse animals 
when it suits us, as the brute creation ; and call 
upon them to bear testimony to our natural conduct, 
when we are pleased to resemble them. Now the 
matter is, that we ought to imitate them solely in 
what is good and beneficial ; and in all other cases, 
give both them and ourselves the benefit of our better 
knowledge. 

Mr. Walscott. Evil will exist in spite of us. 

Mr. Pope. I do not know that. It is impossible 
for us, who only see to the length of a little miserable 
point in the midst of eternity, to say what will or 
will not exist. But we must give our fellow-creatures 
the benefit of our knowledge, and our ignorance too. 
If we cannot abolish evil, we may diminish it, or 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 229 

divide it better ; and nature incites us to do so by 
putting the thought in our heads. It is fancied by 
some, and I dare say anglers fancy it, that animals, 
different from us in their organization, do not feel 
as we do. I hope not. It is at least a good argu- 
ment for consolation, when we can do nothing to 
help them ; but as we are not sure of it, it is an 
argument not to be acted upon when we can. They 
must have the benefit of our want of certainty. 
Come, anglers shall have the benefit of it too. Old 
Walton was as good a man as you could make out 
of an otter : and I like the otter the better for him . 
Dryden, I am sure, was humane : he was too great 
a man to be otherwise. But he had all his bodily 
faculties in perfection ; and I sometimes think, that 
animal spirits take the place of reflection on certain 
animal occasions, and fairly occupy the whole man 
instead of it, even while he thinks he's thinking. 
Yet I am afraid Donne and the others sophisticated ; 
for subtlety was their business. There are certain 
doctrines that do men no good, when the importance 
of a greater or less degree of pain in this world comes 
to be made a question of; and so they get their excuse 
that way. Anything rather than malignity and the 
determination to give pain ; and yet I know not how 



230 TABLE-TALK. 

the angler is to be found guiltless on that score, if 
he reflects on what he is going about. I am sure he 
must hurt his own mind, and perplex his ideas of 
right and wrong. 

Mr. Walscott concluded the argument by owning 
himself much struck with the variety of reflections 
which Mr. Pope had brought forward or suggested. 
He said he thought they would make a good poem. 
Mr. Pope thought so too, if enlivened with wit and 
description ; and said he should, perhaps, turn it in 
his mind. He remarked, that, till the mention of 
it by Sir Kichard Steele, in the Tatter, he really 
was not aware that anything had been said against 
cruelty to animals by an English writer, with the 
exception of the fine hint in Shakspeare about the 
beetle. " Steele," said he, " was then a gay fellow 
about town, and a soldier ; yet he did not think it 
an imputation on his manhood to say a good word 
for tom-tits and robins. Shakspeare, they tell us, 
had been a rural sportsman; and yet he grew to 
sympathize with an insect." I mentioned the Rural 
Sports of Mr. Gay, as enlisting that poet among the 
anglers that rejected worms. "Yes," said he, " Gay 
is the prettiest fera natura that ever was, and catches 
his trout handsomely to dine upon. But you see 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 231 

the effect of habit, even upon him. He must 
lacerate fish, and yet would not hurt a fly. Dr. 
Swift, who loves him as much as he hates angling, 
said to him one day at my Lord Bolingbroke's, 
' Mr. Gay, you are the only angler I ever heard of, 
with an idea in his head ; and it is the only idea 
you have, not worth having.' Angling makes the 
Dean melancholy, and sets him upon his yahoos." 
This authority seemed to make a greater im- 
pression upon Mr. Walscott than all the reasoning. 
He is a very great Tory, and prodigiously admires 
the Dean. Mr. Pope delighted him by asking him 
to come and dine with them both next week ; for 
the Dean is in England, and Mr. Pope's visitor. I 
am to be there too. "But," says he, "you must 
not talk too much about Dryden ; for the Doctor 
does not love him." Mr. Walscott said, he was 
aware of that circumstance from the Dean's works, 
and thought it the only blemish in his character. 
For my part, I had heard a story of Dryden telling 
him he would never be a poet ; but I said nothing. 
Mr. Pope attributed his dislike to a general indigna- 
tion he felt against his relations, for their neglect 
of him, when young. For Dryden was his kinsman. 
The Davenants are his relations, and he does not 



232 TABLE-TALK. 

like them. Mr. Walscott asked if lie was an English- 
man or an Irishman ; for he never could find out. 
" You would find out," answered Pope, " if you 
heard him talk ; for he cannot get rid of the hahit 
of saying a for e. He would he an Englishman 
with all his heart, if he could ; but he is an Irishman, 
that is certain, and with all his heart, too, in one 
sense ; for he is the truest patriot that country ever 
saw. He has the merit of doing Ireland the most 
wonderful services, without loving her ; and so he 
does to human nature, which he loves as little ; or 
at least he thinks so. This, and his wit, is the 
reason why his friends are so fond of him. You 
must not talk to him about Irish rhymes," added 
Mr. Pope, " any more than you must talk to me 
about the gods and abodes in my Homer, which he 
quarrels with me for. The truth is, we all write 
Irish rhymes; and the Dean contrives to be more 
exact that way than most of us." "What! "said 
Mr. Walscott, " does he carry his Irish accent into 
his writings, and yet think to conceal himself?" 
Mr. Pope read to us an odd kind of Latin-English 
effusion of the Dean's, which made us shake with 
laughter. It was about a consultation of physicians. 
The words, though Latin themselves, make English 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 233 

when put together; and the Hibernianism of the 
spelling is very plain. I remember a taste of it. A 
doctor begins by inquiring : 

" Is his Honour sic ? Prse lsetus felis pulse. 
It do es beat veris loto de." * 

Here de spells day. An Englishman would have 
used the word da. 

" No," says the second doctor, "rio notis as qui 
cassi e ver fel tu metri it." f &c. &c. 

Metri for may try. 

Mr. Pope told us, that there were two bad rhymes 
in the Rape of the Lock, and in the space of eight 
lines ; — side and subside, and endued and subdued. J 

Mr. Walscott. Those would be very good 
French rhymes. 

Mr. Pope. Yes, the French make a merit of 
necessity, and force their poverty upon us for riches. 
But it is bad in English. However, it is too late to 
alter what I wrote. I now care less about them, not- 
withstanding the Doctor. When I was a young man, 
I was for the free disengaged way of Dryden, as in the 
Essay on Criticism; but the town preferred the style 

* Is his Honour sick ? Pray let us feel his pulse. It does beat 
very slow to-day. 

f No, no, no ! 't is as quick as I ever felt. You may try it. 
% Vide p. 127 of the present volume. 



234 TABLE-TALK. 

of my Pastorals, and somehow or other I agreed with 
them. I then became very cautious, and wondered 
how those rhymes in the Lock escaped me. But I 
have now come to this conclusion : that when a man 
has established his reputation for being able to do a 
thing, he may take liberties. Weakness is one thing, 
and the carelessness of power another. This makes all 
the difference between those shambling ballads that 
are sold among the common people, and the imitations 
of them by the wits to serve a purpose; between 
Sternhold and Hopkins, and the ballads on the 
Mohocks and great men. Mr. Pope then repeated, 
with great pleasantry, Mr. Gay's verses in the Wonder- 
ful Prophecy : 

From Mohock and from Hawkubite, 

Good Lord, deliver me ! 
Who wander through the streets by night 

Committing cruelty.* 

* The other verses, which Mr. Pope's visitor has not set down, 
are as follows : — 

They slash our sons with bloody knives, 

And on our daughters fall ; 
And if they ravish not our wives, 

We have good luck withal. 
Coaches and chairs they overturn, 

Nay, carts most easily ; 
Therefore from Gog and eke Magog, 
Good Lord, deliver me ! 
The Mohocks were young rakes, of whom terrible stories were 
told. They were said to be all of the Whig party. 



CONYEKSATION OF POPE. 235 

Mr. Walscott, with all his admiration of Dryden, 
is, I can see, a still greater admirer of the style of Mr. 
Pope. But his politics hardly make him know which 
to prefer. I ventured to say that the Rape of the 
Lock appeared to me perfection ; but that still, in 
some kinds of poetry, I thought the licences taken by 
the Essay on Criticism very happy in their effect : as 
for instance, said I, those long words at the end of 
couplets : 

Thus, when we view some well-proportioned dome 

(The world's just wonder, and e'en thine, Eome !) 

No single parts unequally surprise ; 

All come united to the admiring eyes ; 

No monstrous height, or breadth, or length appear ; 

The whole at once is bold and regular. 

Now here, I said, is the regularity and the bold- 
ness too. And again: — 

'Twere well might critics still this freedom take ; 
But Appius reddens at each word you speak, 
And stares tremendous with a threatening eye, 
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry. 

And that other couplet : — 

With him most authors steal their works, or buy ; 
Garth did not write his own Dispensary. 

I said, this last line beginning with that strong 
monosyllable, and throwing off in a sprightly manner 



236 TABLE-TALK. 

the long word at the end, was like a fine bar of 
music, played by some master of the violin. Mr. Pope 
smiled, and complimented me on the delicacy of my 
ear, asking me if I understood music. I said no, but 
was very fond of it. He fell into a little musing, and 
then observed, that he did not know how it was, but 
writers fond of music appeared to have a greater 
indulgence for the licences of versification than any 
others. The two smoothest living poets were not 
much attached to that art. (I guess he meant himself 
and Dr. Swift.) He inquired if I loved painting. I 
told him so much so that I dabbled in it a little my- 
self, and liked nothing so much in the world, after 
poetry. "Why, then," said he, "you and I, some 
fine morning, will dabble in it like ducks." I was 
delighted at the prospect of this honour, but said I 
hoped his painting was nothing nigh equal to his 
poetry, or I would not venture to touch his palette. 
"Oh," cried he, "I will give you confidence." He 
rose with the greatest good-nature, and brought us a 
sketch of a head after Jervis, and another of Mrs. 
Martha. I had begun to fear that they might be 
unworthy of so great a man, even as amusements ; 
but they were really wonderfully well done. I do 
think he would have made a fine artist, had he not 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 237 

been a poet.* He observed that we wanted good 
criticism on pictures ; and that the best we bad yet 
were some remarks of Steele's in the Spectator, on 
the Cartoons of Kaphael. He added a curious observa- 
tion on Milton, — that with all his regard for the poets 
of Italy, and his travels in that country, he has said 
not a word of their painters, nor scarcely alluded to 
painting throughout his works. 

Mr. Walscott. Perhaps there was something 
of the Puritan in that. Courts, in Milton's time, 
had a taste for pictures : King Charles had a fine 
taste. 

Mr. Pope. True ; but Milton never gave up his 
love of music, — his playing on the organ. If he 
had loved painting, he would not have held his 
tongue about it. I have heard somebody remark, 
that the names of his two great archangels are those 
of the two great Italian painters, and that their 
characters correspond ; which is true and odd enough. 
But he had no design in it. He would not have 
confined his praises of Eaphael and Michael Angelo 
to that obscure intimation. I believe he had no eyes 
for pictures. 

* This has been doubted by others who have seen his perfor- 
mances. Some of them remain, and are not esteemed. 



238 TABLE-TALK. 

Me. Walscott. Dryden has said fine things 
about pictures. There is the epistle to your friend 
Sir Godfrey, and the ode on young Mrs. Killigrew. 
Did he know anything of the art ? 

Me. Pope. Why, I believe not; but he dashed 
at it in his high way, as he did at politics and 
divinity, and came off with flying colours. Dryden's 
poetic faith was a good deal like his religious. He 
could turn it to one point after another ; and be just 
enough in earnest to make his belief be taken for 
knowledge. 

Mr. Pope told us that he had been taken, when a 
boy, to see Dryden at a coffee-house. I felt my 
colour change . at this anecdote ; so vain do I find 
myself. I took the liberty of asking him how he felt 
at the sight ; for it seems he only saw Dryden ; he 
did not speak to him, which is a pity. 

Me. Pope. Why, I said to myself, " That is the 
great Mr. Dryden : there he is : he must be a happy 
man.'" This notion of his happiness was the upper- 
most thing in my mind, beyond even his fame. I 
thought a good deal of that ; but I knew no pleasure, 
even at that early age, like writing verses ; and there, 
said I, is the man who can write verses from morn- 
ing till night, and the finest verses in the world. I 



CONVEKSATION OF POPE. 239 

am pretty much of the same way of thinking now. 
Yes ; I really do think that I could do nothing but 
write verses all day long, just taking my dinner, and 
a walk or so, — if I had health. And I suspect it is 
the same with all poets ; I mean with all who have a 
real passion for their art. Mr. Honeycomb, I 
know, agrees with me, from his own experience. 

The gratitude I felt for this allusion to what I 
said to him one day at Button's, was more than I 
can express. I could have kissed his hand out of 
love and reverence. " Sir," said I, " you may guess 
what I think of the happiness of poets, when it puts 
me in a state of delight inconceivable to be supposed 
worthy of such a reference to my opinion." I was 
indeed in a confusion of pleasure. Mr. Walscott said, 
it was fortunate the ladies had left us, or they might 
not have approved of such a total absorption in 
poetry. " Oh," cried Mr. Pope, " there we have 
you ; for the ladies are a part of poetry. We do not 
leave them out in our studies, depend upon it." 

I asked him whom he looked upon as the best 
love-poet among our former writers. I added 
" former," because the Epistle of Elo'ise to Abelarcl 
appears to me to surpass any express poem on that 
subject in the language. He said Waller ; but 



240 TABLE-TALK. 

added, it was after a mode. "Everything," said 
Mr. Pope, "was after a mode then. The best love- 
making is in Shakspeare. Love is a business by 
itself, in Shakspeare ; just as it is in Nature." 

Me. "Walscott. Do you think Juliet is natural 
when she talks of cutting Eomeo into " little stars," 
and making the heavens fine ? 

Mr. Pope. Yes, I could have thought that, or 
anything else, of my mistress, when I was as young 
as Romeo and Juliet. Petrarch, as somebody was 
observing the other day, is natural for the same 
reason, in spite of the conceits which he mixes up 
with his passion ; nay, he is the more natural, 
supposing his passion to have been what I take it ; 
that is to say, as deep and as wonder-working as a 
boy's. The best of us have been spoiled in these 
matters by the last age. Even Mr. Walsh, for all his 
good sense, was out in that affair, in his Preface. 
He saw very well that a man, to speak like a lover, 
should speak as he felt ; but he did not know that 
there were lovers who felt like Petrarch. 

Me. Walscott. You would admire the writings 
of one Drummond, a Scotch gentleman, who was a 
great loyalist. 

Me. Pope. I know him well, and thank you for 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 241 

reminding me of him. If he had written a little later 
here in England, and been published under more 
favourable circumstances, he might have left Waller 
in a second rank. He was more in earnest, and 
knew all points of the passion. There is great 
tenderness in Drummond. He could look at the 
moon, and think of his mistress, without thinking 
how genteelly he should express it ; which is what 
the other could not do. No ; we have really no love- 
poets, except the old dramatic writers ; nor the 
French either, since the time of Marot. We have 
plenty of gallantry and all that. 

Mr. Walscott. And very pretty writing it is, if 
managed as Mr. Pope manages it. 

Me. Pope. I dp not undervalue it, I assure you. 
After Shakspeare, I can still read Voiture, and like 
him very much : only it is like coming from country 
to town, from tragedy to the ridotto. To tell you the 
truth, I am as fond of the better sort of those polite 
writers as any man can be ; and I feel my own 
strength to lie that way ; but I pique myself on 
having something in me besides, which they have 
not. I am sure I should not have been able to 
write the Epistle of Elo'isa, if I hadn't. There is a 
force and sincerity in the graver love-poets, even on 

16 



242 TABLE-TALK. 

the least spiritual parts of the passion, which writers, 
the most ostentatious on that score, might envy. 

Mr. Walscott. The tragedy of love includes 
the comedy, eh ? 

Mr. Pope. Why, that is just about the truth of 
it, and is very well said. 

Mr. Pope's table is served with neatness and 
elegance. He drinks but sparingly. His eating is 
more with an appetite, but all nicely. After dinner, 
he set upon table some wine given him by my Lord 
Peterborough, which was excellent. He then showed 
us his grotto, till the ladies sent to say tea was ready. 
I never see a tea-table but I think of the Rape 
of the Loch. Judge what I felt, when I saw a 
Miss Fermor, kinswoman of Belinda, seated next 
Mrs. Martha Blount, who was making tea and coffee. 
There was an old lady with her ; and several 
neighbours came in from the village. This multitude 
disappointed me, for the talk became too general; 
and my lord's wine, mixed with the other wine and 
the wit, having got a little in my head, and 
Mr. Pope's attention being repeatedly called to other 
persons, I cannot venture to put down any more of 
his conversation. But I shall hear him again, and, I 
hope, again and again. So patience till next week. 



( 243 ) 



CONVEESATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 

RECORDED BY THE SAME VISITOR. 

July 15, 1727. 

At length the dies optanda came. Shall I con- 
fess my weakness ? I could do nothing all the 
morning but walk about, now reading something of 
the Dean's or Mr. Pope's, and now trying to think of 
some smart things to say at dinner ! I did not say 
one of them. Yes, I made an observation on San- 
nazarius, which was well received. I must not forget 
the boatman who took me across the water from 
Sutton. " Young gentleman," says he, " if I may 
make so bold, I will tell you a piece of my mind." 
" Well, pray do." " Why, I'm thinking you're going 
to see your sweetheart, or else the great poet yonder, 
Mr. Pope." "Why so?" said I, laughing. "Why," 
said he, " your eyes are all in a sparkle, and you 
seem in a woundy hurry." I told him he had guessed 
it. He is in the habit of taking visitors over; 
great lords, he said, and grand ladies from court ; 
" and very merry, too, for all that." He mentioned 
Dr. Swift, Mr. Gay, and others. Upon asking if 
Dr. Swift was not one of the great writers, "Ay, 



244 TABLE - TALK. 

ay," said he, " let him alone, I warrant him : he's a 
strange gentleman." The boatman told me, that one 
day the Dean, " as they called him," quarrelled with 
him about a halfpenny. His Reverence made him 
tack about for some whimsey or other, and then 
would not pay him his due, because he did not tell 
him what the fare was the moment he asked. " So 
his Deanship left a cloak in the boat, and I took it 
up to him to Mr. Pope's house, and he came out and 
said, ' Well, sirrah, there's some use in frightening 
you sneaking rascals, for you bring us back our 
goods.' So I thought it very strange ; and says I, 
* Your Reverence thinks I was frightened, eh?' — 
'Yes,' says he, as sharp as a needle, 'haven't you 
done an honest action ? ' Sol was thrown all of a 
heap to hear him talk in such a way ; and as I didn't 
well know what he meant, I grew redder and redder 
like, for want of gift of the gab. So says I,at 
last, ' Well, if your Reverence, or Deanship, or what 
you please to be called, thinks as how I was 
frightened, all that I says is this : d — n me (saving 
your Reverence's presence), if Tom Harden is a man 
to be frightened about a halfpenny, like some folks 
that shall be nameless.' ' Oh, ho ! ' says Mr. Dean, 
looking scared, like an owl in an ivy-bush, ' Tom 



SWIFT AND POPE. 245 

Harden is a mighty pretty fellow, and must not be 
flouted ; and so he won't row me again, I suppose, 
for all he has got a wife and a parcel of brats.' How 
he came to know that, I can't say. ' No, no,' says I, 
' I'm not so much of a pretty fellow as that comes to, 
if that's what they mean by a pretty fellow. It's not 
my business to be picking and choosing my fares, so 
that I gets my due ; but I was right about the half- 
penny for all that ; and if your Reverence wants to 
go a swan-hopping another time, you knows what's 
to pay.' So the Dean fell a-laughing like mad, 
and then looked very grave, and said, * Here, you, 
Mr. John Searle' (for that's Mr. Pope's man's name) — 
' here, make Mr. Thomas Harden acquainted with the 
taste of your beer; and do you, Mr. Thomas, take 
back the cloak, and let it stay another time in the 
boat till I want to return ; and, moreover, Thomas, 
keep the cloak always for me to go home o 'nights in, 
and I will make it worth your while, and leave it you 
when I am dead, provided it's worn out enough.' I 
shall never forget all the odd things he said, for I 
talked 'em over with Mr. Searle. ' And hark'ee, 
Mr. Thomas Harden,' says he; ' remember,' says he, 
'and never forget it, that you love your wife and 
children better than your pride,' says he, ' and your 



246 TABLE-TALK. 

pride,' says he, ' better than a paltry Dean ; and 
those are two nice things to manage together.' And 
the Dean has been as good as his word, young gen- 
tleman ; and I keep his cloak ; and he came to my 
cottage yonder one day, and told my wife she was 
* the prettiest creature of a plain woman ' that he ever 
saw, (did you ever hear the like o' that ?) ; and he 
calls her Pannopy, and always asks how she does. I 
don't know why he calls her Pannopy ; mayhap 
because her pots and pans were so bright ; for you'd 
ha' though- they'd been silver, from the way he 
stared at 'em." * 

Having heard of the Dean's punctuality, I was 
afraid I should be too late for my good behaviour ; 
but Mr. Thomas reassured me by saying that he had 
carried his Keverence across three hours before from 
Kichmond, with Madam Blount. " He is in a 
mighty good humour," said he, " and will make you 
believe anything he likes, if you don't have a care." 

I was in very good time, but found the whole 
party assembled with the exception of Mrs. Pope. 

* Probably from a strange line in Spenser, where he describes 
the bower of Proteus : — ■ 

" There was his wonne ; ne living wight was seene, 
Save one old nymph, bight Panope, to keep it cleane." 

— Fairy Queen, book 3. 



SWIFT AND POPE. 247 

It was the same as before, with the addition of the 
Doctor. He is shorter and stouter than I had fancied 
him, with a face in which there is nothing remark- 
able, at first sight, but the blueness of the eyes. The 
boatman, however, had not prepared me for the 
extreme easiness and good-breeding of his manners. 
I had made a shallow conclusion. I expected some- 
thing perpetually fluctuating between broad mirth 
and a repelling self-assumption. Nothing could be 
more unlike what I found. His mirth, afterwards, 
was at times broad enough, and the ardour and 
freedom of his spirit very evident ; but he has an 
exquisite mode, throughout, of maintaining the 
respect of his hearers. Whether he is so always, 
I cannot say. But I guess that he can make himself 
equally beloved where he pleases, and feared where 
he does not. It must be owned that his mimicry 
(for he does not disdain even that sometimes) would 
not be so well in the presence of foolish people. I 
suppose he is cautious of treating them with it. 
Upon the whole, partly owing to his manners, and 
partly to Mr. Pope's previous encouragement of me 
(which is sufficient to set up a man for anything), I 
felt a great deal more at my ease than I expected, 
and was prepared for a day as good as the last. One 



248 TABLE-TALK. 

of the great arts, I perceive, of these wits, if it be 
not rather to be called one of the best tendencies of 
their nature (I am loth to bring my modesty into 
question by saying what I think of it), is to set you 
at your ease, and enlist your self-love in their favour, 
by some exquisite recognition of the qualities or 
endeavours on which you most pride yourself, or are 
supposed to possess. It is in vain you tell yourself 
they may flatter you. You believe and love the 
flattery ; and let me add (though at the hazard of 
making my readers smile), you are bound to believe 
it, if the bestowers are men of known honesty and 
spirit, and above " buying golden opinions " of every- 
body. I am not sincere when I call it an art. I 
believe it to be good-natured instinct, and the most 
graceful sympathy; and having let this confession 
out, in spite of myself, I beg my dear friends, the 
readers, to think the best they can of me, and pro- 
ceed. The Dean is celebrated for a way he has 
of setting off his favours in this way, by an air of 
objection. Perhaps there is a little love of power 
and authority in this, but he turns it all to grace. 
Mr. Pope did me the honour of introducing me as a 
young gentleman for whom he had a particular 
esteem. The Dean acknowledged my bow in the 



SWIFT AND POPE. 249 

politest manner ; and after asking whether this was 
not the Mr. Honeycomb of whom he had heard talk 
at the coffee-house, looked at me with a serious calm- 
ness, and said, " I would not have you believe, sir, 
everything Mr. Pope says of you." I believe I 
blushed, but without petulance. I answered that my 
self-love was doubtless as great as that of most young 
men, perhaps greater ; and that if I confessed I gave 
way to it in such an instance as the present, some- 
thing was to be pardoned to me on the score of the 
temptation. " But," said he, " Mr. Pope flatters 
beyond all bounds. He introduces a new friend to 
us, and pretends that we are too liberal to be jealous. 
He trumpets up some young wit, Mr. Honeycomb, 
and fancies, in the teeth of all evidence, moral and 
political, that we are to be in love with our suc- 
cessors." I bowed and blushed, indeed, at this. I 
said, that whether a real successor or not, I should 
now, at all events, run the common danger of great- 
ness, in being spoilt by vanity; and that, like a 
subtle prince in possession, the Dean knew how to 
prevent his heirs-presumptive from becoming of any 
value. The Doctor laughed, and said, with the most 
natural air in the world, " I have read some pretty 
things of yours, Mr. Honeycomb, and am happy to 



250 TABLE-TALK. 

make your acquaintance. I hope the times will grow 
smoother as you get older, and that you will furnish 
a new link, some day or other, to re-unite friends 
that ought not to have been separated." This was 
an allusion to certain Whig patrons of mine. It 
affected me much ; and I gladly took the opportunity 
of the silence required by good-breeding, to lay my 
hand upon my heart, and express my gratitude by 
another bow. He saw how nearly he had touched 
me ; for, turning to Mr. Pope, he said gaily, " There 
is more love in our hates now-a-days than there used 
to be in the loves of the wits, when you and I were 
as young as Mr. Honeycomb. What did you care 
for old Wycherley ? or what did Wycherley care for 
Eochester, compared with the fond heats and vexa- 
tions of us party-men?" Mr. Pope's answer was" 
prevented by the entrance of his mother. The Dean 
approached her as if she had been a princess. The 
good old lady, however, looked as if she was to be 
upon her good behaviour, now that the Dean was 
present; and Mrs. Martha Blount, notwithstanding 
he pays court to her, had an air of the same kind. I 
am told that he keeps all the women in awe. This 
must be one of the reasons for their being so fond of 
him, when he chooses to be pleased. Mr. Walscott, 



I SWIFT AND POPE. 251 

whose manners are simple and sturdy, could not 
conceal a certain uneasiness of admiration; and, 
though a great deal more at my ease than I had 
looked to be, I partook of the same feeling. With 
Mr. Pope, all is kindness on one part, and pleased 
homage on the other. Dr. Swift keeps one upon the 
alert, like a field-officer. Yet, externally, he is as 
gentle, for the most part, as his great friend. 

The dinner seemed to be still more neat and 
perfect than the last, though I believe there were no 
more dishes. But the cookery had a more consum- 
mate propriety. The Dean's influence, I suppose, 
pierces into the kitchen. I could not help fancying 
that the dishes were sensible of it, and submitted 
their respective relishes with anxiety. The talk, as 
usual, began upon eating. 

Mr. Pope. I verily believe, that when people eat 
and drink too much, if it is not in the ardour of good 
company, they do it, not so much for the sake of 
eating, as for the want of something better to do. 

Dr. Swift. That is as true a thing as you ever 
said. When I was very solitary in Ireland, I used 
to eat and drink twice as much as at any other time. 
Dinner was a great relief. It cut the day in two. 

Mr. Pope. I have often noticed, that if I am 



252 TABLE-TALK. 

alone, and take up a book at dinner -time, and get 
concerned in it, I do not care to eat any more. What 
I took for an unsatisfied hunger, leaves me— is no 
more thought of. 

Dr. Swift. People mean as much, when they 
say that such and such a thing is meat and drink to 
them. By the same rule, meat and drink is one's 
book. At Laracor, an omelet was Quintus Curtius 
to me ; and the beef, being an epic dish, Mr. Pope's 
Homer. 

Mr. Walscott. You should have dressed it 
yourself, Mr. Dean, to have made it as epic as that. 

Dr. Swift. 'Faith ! I was no hero, and could 
not afford the condescension. A poor vicar must 
have a servant to comfort his pride, and keep him in 
heart and starvation. 

Mr. Walscott. If people eat and drink for 
want of something better to do, there is no fear that 
men of genius will die of surfeiting. They must 
have their thoughts to amuse them, if nothing else. 

The Dean (with vivacity). Their thoughts ! 
Their fingers' ends, to bite till the blood come. 
That, Mr. Walscott, depends on the state of the 
health. I was once returning to dinner at Laracor, 
when I saw a grave little shabby-looking fellow sitting 



SWlFT AND POPE. 253 

on a stile. I asked him what he did idling there. 
He answered, very philosophically, that he was the 
Merry Andrew lately arrived, and that, with my leave, 
he wonld drink my health in a little more fresh air, 
for want of a better draught. I told him I was a 
sort of Merry Andrew myself, and so invited him to 
dinner. The poor man became very humble and 
thankful, and turned out a mighty sensible fellow ; 
so I got him a place with an undertaker, and he is 
now merry in good earnest. I put some pretty 
"thoughts" in his head, before he left me. A 
cousin of mine sent them me from Lisbon, in certain 
long-necked bottles, corked, and sealed up. My 
Lord Peterborough has a cellar full of very pretty 
thoughts. God grant we all keep our health ! and 
then, young gentleman (looking very seriously at me, 
for I believe he thought my countenance expressed a 
little surprise) — and then we shall turn our thoughts 
to advantage for ourselves and for others. 

Mrs. Pope. If there's any gentleman who could 
do without his wine, I think it must be my lord. 
When I was a little girl, I fancied that great generals 
were all tall stately persons, with one arm a-kimbo, 
and a truncheon held out in the other ; and I thought 
they all spoke grand, and like a book. 



254 TABLE-TALK. 

Dr. Swift. Madam, that was Mr. Pope's poetry, 
struggling to be born before its time. 

Mrs. Pope. I protest, when I first had the 
honour of knowing my Lord Peterborough, he almost 
frightened me with his spirits. I believe he saw it ; 
for all of a sudden he became the finest, softest- 
spoken gentleman that I ever met with ; and I fell 
in love with him. 

Mrs. Blount. Oh, Madam, I shall tell ! and 
we'll all dance at my lady's wedding. 

I do not know which was the handsomer sight ; 
the little blush that came over the good old lady's 
cheek as she ended her speech, or the affectionate 
pleasantness with which her son regarded her. 

Mr. Pope. You did not fall in love with Lord 
Peterborough because he is such a fine-spoken gen- 
tleman, but because he is a fine gentleman and a 
madcap besides. I know the tastes of you ladies of 
the civil wars. 

The Dean. 'Tis a delicious rogue! (and then, 
as if he had spoken too freely before strangers) — 'tis 
a great and rare spirit ! If all the world resembled 
Lord Peterborough, they might do without con- 
sciences. I know no fault in him, but that he is too 
fond of fiddlers and singers. 



SWIFT AND POPE. 255 

Mr. Pope. Here is Mr. Honeycomb, who will 
venture to dispute with you on that point. 

I said, Mr. Pope paid me too great a compliment. 
I might venture to differ from Dr. Swift, but hardly 
to dispute with him.' 

Dr. Swift. Oh, Mr. Honeycomb, you are too 
modest, and I must pull down your pride. You have 
heard of little Will Harrison, poor lad, who wrote 
the Medicine for the Ladies, in the Tatler. Well, 
he promised to be one of your great wits, and was 
very much of a gentleman ; and so he took to wear- 
ing thin waistcoats, and died of a birthday suit. 
Now, thin waistcoats and soft sounds are both of 
'em bad habits, and encourage a young man to keep 
late hours, and get his death o' cold. 

I asked whether he could not admit a little 
" higher argument" in the musician than the tailor. 
Shakspeare says of a flute, that it " discoursed excel- 
lent music ; " as if it had almost been a rational 
creature. 

Dr. Swift. A rational fiddlestick! It is not 
Shakspeare that says.it, but Hamlet, who was out of 
his wits. Yes, I have heard a flute discourse. Let 
me see— -I have heard a whole roomful of 'em 
discourse (and then he played off an admirable piece 



256 TABLE - TALK. 

of mimicry, which ought to have been witnessed, to 
do it justice). Let me see — let me see. The flute 
made the following excellent remarks — Tootle, tootle, 
tootle, tootle, — tootle, tootle tee ; — and then again, 
which I thought a new observation, — Tootle, tootle, 
tootle with my reedle, tootle, ree. Upon which the 
violin observed, in a very sprightly manner, Nicldle, 
niddle, nicldle, niddle, niddle, niddle, nee, with my 
nee, with my long nee ; which the bass-viol, in his 
gruff but sensible way, acknowledged to be as witty a 
thing as he had ever heard. This was followed by a 
general discourse, in which the violin took the lead, 
all the rest questioning and reasoning with one 
another, as hard as they could drive, to the admira- 
tion of the beholders, who were never tired of 
listening. They must have carried away a world of 
thoughts. For my part, my deafness came upon me. 
I never so much lamented it. There was a long 
story told by a hautboy, which was considered so 
admirable, that the whole band fell into a transport 
of scratching and tootling. I observed the flute's 
mouth water, probably at some remarks on 
green peas, which had just come in season. It 
might have been guessed, by the gravity of the 
hearers, that the conversation chiefly ran upon the 



SWIFT AND POPE. 257 

new king and queen ; but I believe it was upon peri- 
wigs ; for turning to that puppy Kawlinson, and asking 
what he concluded from all that, he had the face to 
tell me, that it gave him a " heavenly satisfaction." 

We laughed heartily at this sally against music. 
— Dr. Swift was very learned on the dessert. He said 
he owed his fructification to Sir William Temple. I 
observed that it was delightful to see so great a man 
as Sir William Temple so happy as he appears to have 
been. The otium cum dignitate is surely nowhere to 
be found, if not as he has painted it in his works. 

Dr. Swift. The otium cum digging potatoes is 
better. I could show you a dozen Irishmen (which 
is a great many for thriving ones) who have the 
advantage of him. Sir William was a great, but 
not a happy man. He had an ill stomach. What is 
worse, he gave me one. He taught me to eat platefuls 
of cherries and peaches, when I took no exercise. 

A. H. What can one trust to, if the air of 
tranquillity in his writings is not to be depended on ? 

Mr. Pope. I believe he talks too much of his 
ease, to be considered very easy. It is an ill head 
that takes so much concern about its pillow. 

Dr. Swift. Sir William Temple was a martyr 
to the " good sense " that came up in those days. 

17 



258 TABLE-TALK. 

He had sick blood, that required stirring ; but because 
it was a high strain of good sense to agree with 
Epicurus and be of no religion, it was thought the 
highest possible strain, in anybody who should not 
go so far, to live in a garden as Epicurus did, and 
lie quiet, and be a philosopher. . So Epicurus got a 
great stone in his kidneys ; and Sir William used to 
be out of temper, if his oranges got smutted. 

I thought there was a little spleen in this account 
of Temple, which surprised me, considering old 
times. But if it be true that the giddiness, and 
even deafness, to which the Dean is subject, is owing 
to the philosopher's bad example, one can hardly 
wonder at its making him melancholy. He sat 
amidst a heap of fruit without touching it. 

Me. Pope. Sir William, in his Essay on Gar- 
dening, says, he does not know how it is that Lucre- 
tius' s account of the gods is thought more impious 
than Homer's, who makes them as full of bustle and 
bad passions as the meanest of us. Now it is very clear : 
for the reason is, that Homer's gods have something 
in common with us, and are subject to our troubles 
and concerns; whereas Lucretius's live like a parcel 
of bon-vivants by themselves, and care for nobody. 

The Dean. There are two admirable good things 



SWIFT AND POPE. 259 

in that essay. One is an old usurer's, who said, 
' ' that no man could have peace of conscience, that 
run out of his estate." The other is a Spanish pro- 
verb ; that " a fool knows more in his own house, 
than a wise man in another's." 

The conversation turning upon our discussion last 
time respecting anglers, the Dean said he once asked 
a scrub who was fishing, if he ever caught the 
fish called the Scream. The man protested he had 
never heard of such a fish. " What ! " says the 
Doctor, " you an angler, and never heard of the fish 
that gives a shriek when coming out of the water ! 
It is true it is not often found in these parts ; but 
ask any Crim Tartar, and he will tell you of it. 'Tis 
the only fish that has a voice ; and a sad dismal 
sound it is." The man asked, who could be so 
barbarous as to angle for a creature that shrieked ? — 
"That," says the Doctor, "is another matter: but 
what do you think of fellows that I have seen, whose 
only reason for hooking and tearing all the fish they 
can get at, is that they do not scream ? " I shouted 
this not in his ear, and he almost shuffled himself 
into the river. 

Mr. Walscott. Surely, Mr. Dean, this argu- 
ment would strike the dullest. 



260 TABLE-TALK. 

Dr. Swift. Yes, if you could turn it into a 
box on the ear. Not else. They would fain give 
you one meantime, if they had the courage ; for men 
have such a perverse dread of the very notion of 
doing wrong, that they would rather do it, than be 
told of it. You know Mr. Wilcox of Hertfordshire ? 
(to Mr. Pope). I once convinced him he did an 
inhuman thing, in angling; at least, I must have 
gone very near to convince him ; for he cut short the 
dispute, by referring me to his friends for a good 
character. It gives one the spleen to see an honest 
man make such an owl of himself. 

Me. Pope. And all anglers, perhaps, as he was ? 

Dr. Swift. Very likely, 'faith. A parcel of 
sneaking, scoundrelly understandings get some honest 
man to do as they do, and then, forsooth, must dis- 
honour him with the testimony of their good opinion. 
No ; it requires a very rare benevolence, or as great 
an understanding, to see beyond even such a paltry 
thing as this angling, in angling times ; about as 
much as it would take a good honest-hearted cannibal 
to see further than man-eating, or a goldsmith beyond 
his money. What ! isn't Tow-wow a good husband 
and jaw-breaker; and must he not stand upon re- 
putation ? 



SWIFT AND POPE. 261 

Mr. Walscott. It is common to hear people 
among the lower orders talk of "the poor dumb 
animal," when they desire to rescue a cat or dog 
from ill-treatment. 

The Dean. Yes ; and the cat is not dumb ; nor 
the dog either. A horse is dumb ; a fish is dumber ; 
and I suppose this is the reason why the horse is the 
worst used of. any creature, except trout and gray- 
ling. Come : this is melancholy talk. Mrs. Patty, 
why didn't you smoke the bull? 

Mrs. Blount. Smoke the bull, sir ? 

Dr. Swift. Yes; I have just made a bull. I 
said horses were dumb, and fish dumber. 

Mrs. Pope. Pray, Mr. Dean, why do they call 
those kind of mistakes bulls ? 

Dr. Swift. Why, madam, I cannot tell ; but I 
can tell you the prettiest bull that ever was made. 
An Irishman laid a wager with another, a bricklayer, 
that he could not carry him to the top of a building, 
in his hod. The fellow took him up, and, at the risk 
of both their necks, landed him safely. " Well," 
cried the other, " you have done it ; there's no 
'denying that ; but at the fourth story I had hopes." 

Mr. Pope. Doctor, I believe you take the word 
smoke to be a modern cant phrase. I found it, when 



262 TABLE - TALK. 

I was translating Homer, in old Chapman. He says 
that Juno " smoked" Ulysses through his disguise. 

Mention was made of the strange version of 
Hobbes. 

Mr. Pope. You recollect, Mr. Honeycomb, the 
passage in the first book of Homer, where Apollo 
comes down to destroy the Greeks, and how his 
quiver sounded as he came ? 

"Yes, sir," said I, " very well;" and I quoted 
from his translation : — 

Fierce as he moved, the silver shafts resound. 

Mr. Pope. I was speaking of the original; but 
that line will do very well to contrast with Hobbes. 
What think you of 

His arrows chink as often as he jogs ! 

Mr. Pope mentioned another passage just as 
ridiculous. I forget something of the first line, and a 
word in the second. Speaking of Jupiter, he says, — 

With that ■- his great black brow he nodded ; 

Wherewith (astonish'd) were the powers divine : 
Olympus shook at shaking of his God-head, 

And Thetis from it jump'd into the brine. 

Mr. Pope. Dryden good-naturedly says of 
Hobbes, that he took to poetry when he was too old. 



SWIFT AND POPE. 263 

Dean Swift (with an arch look). Perhaps had 
he begun at forty, as Dryden did, he would have been 
as great as my young master. 

Mr. Walscott could not help laughing to hear 
Dryden, and at forty, called "my young master." 
However, he was going to say something, but de- 
sisted. I wish I could recollect many more things 
that were said, so as to do them justice. Altogether, 
the day was not quite so pleasant as the former one. 
With Mr. Pope, one is both tranquil and delighted. 
Dr. Swift somehow makes me restless. I could hear 
him talk all day long, but should like to be walking 
half the time, instead of sitting. Besides, he did 
not appear quite easy himself, notwithstanding what 
the boatman said; and he looked ill. I am told 
he is very anxious about the health of a friend in 
Ireland. 



THE END. 



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